Attention to the Unseen

Jonathan Martin writes: Will this go down as the week that the grand plan to deny Donald Trump the nomination fell apart? For months, high-level Republican lawmakers, donors and strategists eager to block Trump have described, in separate conversations with me, an endgame to the presidential primary. When it becomes clear in the early state and national polling who is consolidating support, the most influential figures with ties to the lagging candidates will stage a sort of political intervention and…

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David Frum writes: In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning. DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among…

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Michael Kruse writes: A telegenic former television personality, a breast cancer survivor and a mother of three young kids, Casey, 42, has a sort of policy portfolio of her own that ranges from hurricane recovery to issues of mental health. In the DeSantis political project, she is unusually important and uncommonly involved, according to hundreds of interviews over the last few years and more than 60 more over the last few weeks — an array of former staffers, current supporters…

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Jack Shafer writes: Noting both his rigid demeanor and his deliberate avoidance of the nonpartisan press, the reporters covering DeSantis have gathered these behavioral cues to sew the candidate a straitjacketed image, portraying him as a locked up, frozen and vengeful character whose veins pump bile, not blood. He’s now in a box — likely for his entire 2024 campaign — that will be difficult to break out of, even for the most talented escape artist. Like many press portraits,…

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The Washington Post reports: In the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump stayed mostly silent, and when he finally delivered his farewell address to the nation, he disavowed the attack on the U.S. Capitol as something that “all Americans were horrified by” and “can never be tolerated.” Now, as Trump seeks to return to the White House, he speaks of Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day.” He says there was no reason for police to shoot the…

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Philip Bump writes: The Republican-led House Oversight Committee has spent most of the past five months hard at work trying to link “the Biden family” (read: relatives of President Biden but not Biden himself) to millions of dollars proffered by foreign business interests before Biden became president. With the 2024 presidential campaign already at the top of the political conversation, the idea that some revelation might prove to be politically damaging to the incumbent is obviously a central motivation. It…

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