We’ve talked a lot recently about presidential politics as a series of performances of power. When I coined the phrase “bitch-slap politics” (later revised to “dominance politics”) in 2004, it was in reference to the “swift boat” campaign George W. Bush mobilized against John Kerry. In charge of the campaign was Donald Trump’s current co-campaign head, Chris LaCivita. The truth of those attacks weren’t the point. They were demonstrations of power. Bush was powerful because he could hit Kerry in a demeaning and vicious way and he would not or could not defend himself. This was an element of American political culture which Trump, a decade later, placed at the center of American political culture.

It was in this context that I saw the news, first reported by the Post, that JD Vance, at a private fundraiser, referred to the candidate switch as a “sucker punch.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, over the course of the first week of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, when it was hard to know what was real or what was happening, “weird” suddenly became a central part of the story. If this hasn’t locked on your radar yet, this is the gist: It’s hard to know precisely where it started, but Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has gotten the most attention for pushing and then amplifying it. Quite simply, he said, guys like Trump and Vance are just “weird.” And along with the dominating freight train of Kamala Week One, that message, that identification, seemed to connect in ways that “authoritarian” and “extremist” and “threat to democracy” never quite did. JD Vance is a big supporter of “menstrual surveillance,” he’s got this weird snarling anger at women with no children. It may be bad and wrong, but everyone gets that its just … well, weird.

And look, JD Vance is super weird. But what’s been most interesting to me is that over the last handful of days I’ve had several friends reach out to me and ask, “Where are you on ‘weird’?”

They don’t feel the need for any additional explanation. And they’re right.

We’ve now had a round of polls of the Harris-Trump race since she became the Democrats’ de facto nominee. All of these polls must be viewed as snapshots in an extremely fluid and unsettled political moment. But we can draw out some early patterns. I averaged all the post-Biden drop-out polls and they come out to Trump up by 4/10ths of one percentage point. That’s about the high water mark that Biden ever got to all year. That average also includes CNN and Times, which have been two of the worst polls for Democrats this year. So the mix of just who has released a poll probably slightly favors Trump.

More interesting to me are the polls out of the swing states, which we’ve already gotten a decent number of. They now show all three Blue Wall states (MI, WI, PA) as ties. Notably, they now show Georgia as a margin of error race, with Harris one or two points back. That’s a major shift. Trump has held a consistent lead of 5 or 6 percentage points there. I only saw one poll each out of Arizona and Nevada and those didn’t show the same shift. Unclear whether that’s unique to these states or whether more polls will show a clearer pattern. The relevant point is that early evidence seems to show Harris significantly growing the map, giving her multiple potential paths to an electoral college win.

As you know, I’ve been on this story for a while: why there was never any law enforcement briefing or qualified medical report on the Butler, PA shooting incident or information of how Donald Trump was injured. I was especially interested in this because originally Pennsylvania State Police briefed reporters that Trump had been hit by flying debris kicked up by the gunfire. The storyline changed when Trump went on Truth Social and announced that a bullet had hit his ear. From that moment that was the story followed universally in the press.

But yesterday FBI Director Christopher Wray said, ironically in response to a question from Rep. Jim Jordan, that it’s not clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or debris kicked up by the gunfire. I think in context that’s likely a bureaucratic and gentle way of saying Trump probably wasn’t hit by a bullet. But let’s stick to the precise words. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear.”

Here’s the actual exchange.

According to some of the country’s most prominent news publications, the Democratic establishment moved quickly beginning Sunday afternoon to lock down the Democratic presidential nomination for Kamala Harris. Said Axios this morning: “It’s over. The Democratic establishment pushed out Biden and locked in Kamala Harris with astonishing speed and efficacy.” The Times published a piece entitled “How Democrats Learned to Love the Smoke-Filled Room Again.” But the idea that the ‘establishment’ anointed Kamala Harris and locked the nomination down for her turns the whole matter pretty much on its head. What locked in Harris was the overwhelming resistance of Democratic voters and activists to anyone else. It was national columnists and a significant number of Democratic elites who were pushing for the thunderdome primary.

A good bit of this was support for Harris herself. A lot of it was the fact that with the incumbent president and presumed nominee out and no time to run anything other than a fake primary Harris had democratic legitimacy on her side. Eighty million voters literally chose her in 2020 to be the person who took over for Joe Biden if he couldn’t serve. Democratic primary voters in effect reconfirmed that this Spring since Biden and Harris were again running as a package deal. Few things are more embedded in American political culture than the idea that vice presidents succeed presidents.