Today marks twenty-five years since the September 11th attacks. In many ways, it feels like another age—and the pre-9/11 era even more so. But the pain lingers, especially for those who lost someone that day. They’re in our thoughts today. Happy Friday.

Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live today at 12:30 p.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

Stick a Fork in ’Em.

by Andrew Egger

Ever since Democrats’ major overperformance in last year’s off-year elections, I’ve been saying over and over: time is a finite resource for Donald Trump and his party. If they wanted to stave off disaster in the midterms, they would need to get moving fast to woo back disaffected members of their 2024 coalition. Every day spent failing to achieve that goal was a day wasted.

Now, in the afterglow of this week’s ludicrous, somnambulant GOP midterm convention, I’m about ready to call it. Republicans are out of ideas and out of time. They have no plan to reassemble their base, no bright ideas to reassure Americans that the Trump show has brought anything but chaos and expense to their country, no reason even to hope that material conditions won’t be worse in November than they are today. The midterms are still two months away, but the MAGA GOP is a dead party walking.

Over and over again, the convention hammered home the two central truths of the party’s disastrous plight: Trump is a senile old villain whose necrotizing brain is leaking out of his ears, and Republicans’ electoral chances now rest entirely on convincing the public otherwise.

Nobody was going to tell Trump “no” about anything: If he wanted to natter on for nearly two hours on Wednesday night and then make a (mercifully much shorter) speech Thursday rehashing the same points, he’d get to. Somehow, Trump genuinely seems to think this is the ticket to winning everybody back: All he needs to do is get in front of Americans to make the case himself.

But he had nothing on offer but hours of the same reheated slurry we’ve long since grown accustomed to. There were, of course, the bald-faced lies. “Look at that,” Trump said, looking out over the half-full convention stadium. “The highest rafter, no empty seats.” There were the endless hallucinations about the American Golden Age that exists nowhere but in his own mind. “Our country has never done better,” he said. “We’re taking in trillions, trillions of dollars. There’s never been any country, not even close, that’s come anywhere near.” There were the ridiculous pie-in-the-sky promises, stripped of all pretense: “If we win, it’s $5,000 for every adult. We love our adults. It’s about time we take care of our adults.” Sometimes he was begging. “Pretend I’m on the ballot.” (More on that below.) Other times he was threatening. At one point, he led the crowd in a bizarre repeat-after-me oath in which they pledged they would show up and vote. “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to Hell.”

Meanwhile, out in the real world, things are crashing down around Trump’s ears. Even the softest of softball interviews, like one he did yesterday with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, are now impossible for him to get through without embarrassment. On those $5,000 checks, for instance: “Why not just give the money now?” Ingraham asked. “If you have the money, why not give it now?”

“Because they can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it,” Trump said. “Because with them it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.”

In the same interview, Trump—whose entire pitch is that Democrats retaking Congress will lead to a communist revolution in America—suddenly suggested offhand it wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. He didn’t intend to campaign as hard as he had in 2024, at any rate. “I’ll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won’t be the same, but I’ll be a blocker, and probably be able to make deals with them,” Trump said. “You make deals. . . . So it’s not as dire. Maybe it is as dire.”

None of this is some big revelation, exactly. Republicans know what they have with Trump. If we learned anything last night, it’s how screwed the GOP will be even as they try to move past him.

When the Republican convention schedule dropped, one of the biggest surprises was the way the party had divvied up the keynotes. Even though Trump ended up getting back on stage for an encore performance last night, it was still notable that the bigger closing-night slot went to Vice President JD Vance. The decision seemed to highlight an interesting piece of strategic thinking: The GOP’s brain trust is already looking ahead to a future when someone—probably Vance—is going to need to try to hold together Trump’s unique base.

It’s unclear whether anyone will be able to do this. It’s even more unclear whether Vance will. Frankly, I’m just not sure he has the juice. He’s perfectly capable of lying as shamelessly as Trump does, and of reaching just as deep into the gutter to smear his opponents: At one point, Vance suggested that Texas Democrat James Talarico has a sexual fetish for trans children. But he lacks Trump’s unique charisma, the winking carnival-barker energy that has for so long let the president get away with pretty much anything.

More importantly, Vance has nothing new to offer. The most notable moment of the vice president’s speech came when he made a direct case to Republican voters incensed about the Iran war. Vance himself, it has been very clear, sees his own complicity in that war as politically disastrous: He’s supposed to be an anti-war America Firster, and his team regularly leaks to the press to keep the narrative that the vice president has had major reservations about the conflict alive. But last night, all Vance could give was a halfhearted plea that Republicans who hate the war should turn up and vote for them anyway—because Charlie Kirk would have wanted them too and, anyway, you can’t let the other lunatics get back in power.

The GOP has tied itself more tightly to Trump than any party has ever tied itself to a single figure. They have cut themselves off from any possible exit strategy. Now they—and we—are just waiting for the electoral hammer to fall.

Whatever You Say, Sir

by William Kristol

Last night, at the Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump asked his followers to make believe. “Pretend I’m on the ticket. I’m not on the ticket. You’ve got to pretend I’m on the ticket. You’ve got to pretend.”

Trump thinks this pretense would lead his loyalists to turn out in droves to save the Republicans in November.

Except that, as a Quinnipiac poll released a few hours before Trump’s speech reminds us, pretending Trump is on the ballot won’t help Republicans. The public is sick of Trump.

According to Quinnipiac, 33 percent of voters now approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 59 percent disapprove. In April, the same pollster showed Trump with 38 percent approval and 55 p