When Ron Klain admitted to me a year ago that the White House could have worked harder to elevate Kamala Harris’s profile, he didn’t know that the Democratic Party, and perhaps American democracy itself, would soon be riding on her readiness to be president. But perhaps he should have.
It was July 2023, and while interviewing President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff in his law office in downtown Washington, D.C.

The last time Britain traded a Conservative government for a Labour one, back in 1997, the mood was so buoyant that the new prime minister, Tony Blair, declared: “A new dawn has broken, has it not?” His successor Keir Starmer is far less of a showman, and even many of his supporters feel pessimistic about Britain’s future prospects. Yet the scale of Starmer’s victory today appears comparable to Blair’s landslide.

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.

As a hamburger enthusiast, I often need directions to some burger joint I’ve never tried. Recently, my phone’s instructions sent me toward the on-ramp for the interstate. Then the app urged me, in 500 feet, to merge onto the freeway. By that time, though, what else could I have done? Did the app imagine that I might get confused, and turn around instead?
Mapping software is incredible.

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Two years ago, I had a conversation that I have thought about almost every day since. Some pals and I were playing a board game, and—don’t worry, I will not try to explain the rules of a board game to you here. But suffice it to say, it involved naming colors.

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Can the Democratic Party break out of the bubble it has created and sustained for so long? Or will it double down on the denial?
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Anne Applebaum: Time to roll the dice
John Dean: Richard Nixon would have loved the Court’s immunity decision.

Last Thursday was not a good day for Joe Biden. During the president’s shaky and at times incoherent debate performance, he appeared weaker and frailer in real time than the American public had ever seen. Friday appears to have been a much better day. At a campaign rally in North Carolina, clips of which his campaign distributed online, the president seemed like an entirely different man. Lively and invigorated, he spoke with a ferocity that had eluded him on the debate stage.

On Sunday morning, Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina tried to cover for President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance with an explanation that was an extreme reach. “All of us know how stutterers operate,” Clyburn said on CNN’s State of the Union. He was just the latest Biden supporter to use the president’s lifelong stutter as a shield against legitimate public concern, an excuse that many others used across social platforms.

Updated at 9:40 p.m. ET on July 3, 2024
Richard Nixon would have been thrilled with the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. United States earlier this week.
I would know. I served as Nixon’s White House counsel until he fired me in April 1973 for seeking to end the Watergate cover-up by openly cooperating with the investigation of the White House’s involvement.

Joe Biden must resign the presidency. The last person to do so was Richard Nixon, who left in disgrace after abusing the powers of his office. Nixon had to resign because he led an assault on American democracy. Biden must resign for the opposite reason: to give American democracy its best chance of surviving.
The American right has spent every day since Biden was nominated in 2020 presenting him as an incompetent, doddering old fool, incapable of discharging the responsibilities of the office.