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Aloha and goedenavond from Gotham City, where the sight of my beloved Dodgers taking two of three this weekend from the Bronx Blockheads at Yankee Stadium was almost—almost—enough to allay the sense of alarm, apprehension, and abhorrence swelling in my soul over the increasingly likely prospect of the Celtics hanging an 18th NBA championship banner from the rafters at Boston’s TD Garden. (Why do I hate the Lame-Ass Leprechauns so much? I can’t state my reasons as pithily as LeBron has summarized his, but trust me, they are plentiful and unimpeachable.)
In tonight’s edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, we shift focus away from that infinitely expanding attention sponge, Donald Trump, and turn to President Biden, whose first post-verdict week of big-stage presidential events and brass-tacks politicking seemed destined for derailment by a much-discussed and even more-debated Wall Street Journal magnum opus on his advanced age and allegedly escalating infirmity—until, quelle surprise, it wasn’t.
But first…
🎙️We have liftoff: Last week, with just the right amount of fanfare (i.e., the bare minimum) we rolled out the new twice-weekly podcast I’ve been promising since I took up residence here in Greater Puckistan: Impolitic With John Heilemann (which, for all the O.G.s out there, is really a retooled, rebranded, bigger, better version of my previous pod, Hell & High Water). Thanks a ton to the audio maestros at Audacy, Puck’s podcast partner on this venture and others, for their invaluable assistance in lighting the candle and launching the show into low-Earth orbit.
If you haven’t already, check out the inaugural episode, with former federal prosecutor and Robert Mueller lieutenant Andrew Weissmann, in which Andrew declares that, if he were...
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| In the wake of the Trump trial verdict, my longtime pal Dan Balz of The Washington Post—the unofficial inheritor of his late, great, former colleague David Broder’s unofficial status as dean of the national political press corps, and a man still sprier at age 78 than I was in my freaking thirties—dropped a typically sage piece in which he argued that, while the ultimate impact of Trump’s 34-count guilty verdict was presently unknowable, its arrival marked the start of a new phase in the 2024 election. “The seven-week trial,” Dan wrote, “amounted to an extended freeze in a campaign that has been static since last year”—a period when the former president was mostly absent from the hustings and the current one studiously kept his trap shut about... |
