Recent weeks in politics are the strangest of my career

I think the last few weeks have been among the strangest in my entire career of working at politics and studying politics. First of all, watching President Trump, get shot live on camera, fall down, jumped back up his face bleeding, raising his fist, and yelling, fight, fight, fight. And then USA, USA. That was astonishing. And of course, it changed the whole tenor of the Republican Convention, gave Republicans an enormous surge of pride and deep commitment to President Trump. And really a gave you a sense of you were standing in the face of history closed, and I were at the convention. And we both gave speeches, she gave a speech on religious liberty, I gave a speech on national security and foreign affairs. And the convention was electric. And every time President Trump came in, he came every night, the only candidate I know who’s ever come every single night, people were just awestruck and thrilled that he was alive that he was well, and he seemed kind of subdued the first two or three nights.

A little bit like, you know, he realized that God had saved him. And if he’d if he’d been just half an inch from turning his head, for 10 seconds slower, turning his head would have been dead. And the country, I think, would have been in a rage. So we went from there, that amazingly good convention overall, got home. And Sunday, we’re preparing lunch, and close to turns and says,

President Biden just dropped out.

And I frankly thought it was Babylon B. I mean,

on a Sunday afternoon, to send a letter on X is such a weird way to do it.

But obviously, it was true. And so for about an hour, there was talk about Biden, and what was Biden going to do, and what did all this mean and how to change the campaign. And then Biden endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice president, and suddenly there’s a surge towards Kamala Harris. And she becomes virtually the inevitable Democratic nominee raises a huge amount of money in a couple of days apart, I think out of just relief from PIB Democrats who knew that you couldn’t go into the fall campaign, with President Biden less and less capable cognitively. And with President Trump, clearly so much more aggressive, and so much more physically capable.

This has been kind of the wildest up and down, it’s like riding a wild river. Every time you’d look around, something new and different would be happening. So I think we’re going to be in for a very interesting, very intense, and very competitive presidential campaign. And I think it’ll be a significant question of who defines who does Trump do a better more effective job of defining vice president Harris as a San Francisco radical? Or does she do a better job of defining Trump as somebody who is so tumultuous that you don’t want to spend four more years old? This is going to be a campaign for the ages.