Aloha, namaste, and—as the hundreds of thousands of decent, hard-working, and now unforgivably slandered Haitian immigrants who help make America a better place, in Springfield, Ohio, and beyond would say—bonswa zanmim yo as I make my way from Gotham City to Asbury Park to see my Miami pal Steve Van Zandt, his fellow E Street Band mates, and their boss (a.k.a., The Boss) play tonight on Jersey shore at the Sea.Hear.Now festival.

In tonight’s edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic, we examine the fantastically terrible, terrifically horrible, spectacularly bad fallout in Donald Trump’s orbit from his debate last Tuesday night with Kamala Harris. Having covered the man’s adventures and misadventures in the realm of presidential politics from the moment he came down the Trump Tower lobby escalator in June of 2015—and, really, even before that—I’m acutely aware that overstated melodrama is among the cardinal occupational hazards for those of us with this gig. But I will say that, right now, it strains every single fiber of my being to gaze upon the squealing goat rodeo that’s consumed The Donald’s inner circle, and the MAGA-sphere more broadly, and the Republican Party writ large since the debate and not label it Trumpocalypse Now.

🗞️ Essential reading: Because a fair number of New York Times opinion section guest essays fall just the tiniest bit short of meriting the slug I used to tee up this item, there’s a chance you missed my buddy Michael Hirschorn’s tour de force in the paper of record this weekend. If so, do yourself a favor, hit this link, and prepare yourself for a wild ride and deeply revelatory read.

Hirschorn is currently C.E.O. of TV production company Ish Entertainment, formerly head of programming at VH1, and easily one of the most brilliant thinkers of my generation in the media biz. So my expectations when I settled in to read his essay—which bears the title “How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity”—were, ahem, high. And yet, the piece, replete with sharp-eyed observations and jaw-dropping conceptual leaps, blew the doors off those expectations again and again. No kidding, friends: If you are, as Hirschorn puts it, “still struggling to understand how Donald Trump could remain within sight of being our president again despite flattering dictators, inspiring an attempted coup, getting convicted on 34 felony counts, vowing to shred the Constitution and imprison opponents, and decorating his bathroom with state secrets,” the path to enlightenment begins with this meta-textual masterpiece, which entitles the author to plausibly claim the title of “Gen X’s own Jean Baudrillard.”

🎧Essential listening: We played a helluva double-header last week in Impolitic Park, starting with the extra-innings special episode we cranked out with my partners and self-styled Puck Superfriends Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby—which turned out to be (as expected) hella fun to do and (less expectedly, but super-satisfyingly) the most downloaded episode on drop day in the brief history of the podcast since it became part of the Puck empire.

Then, for our Friday episode, we posted a conversation I really loved having with a guy I always love talking to—former ABC News anchor turned meditation guru Dan Harris—which focused in part on the urgent topic of how to stay sane during the homestretch of this year’s election. And guess what? That one surged up the download charts, too. So if you missed either or both, you’re gonna wanna rectify that by checking ’em out right here.

🚨🚨 Coming attractions: As former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour likes to say about politics, “Good gets better and bad gets worse”—and, as it happens, the same is true in the podcast prefecture. So in the spirit of keeping up the Big Mo we seem to have on Impolitic With John Heilemann, we are as pleased as punch to announce two new humdinger episodes in the pipeline for the week ahead: the first, dropping Wednesday morning, with the second gentleman of the United States, Douglas Emhoff, and the second, dropping on Friday, with one of the Democratic Party’s most talented communicators and most promising rising stars, Pete Buttigieg. Since you’re obviously not gonna wanna miss either of these beauties, the safe play is to run, don’t walk, here or here and follow Impolitic, stat!

Bill Clinton didn’t snatch the Oval Office from George H.W. Bush in 1992 on the debate stage; 41’s son, George W., didn’t triumph over Al Gore due to the magnum force of his forensic mastery. The three debates between Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008 were all more or less forgotten within days, and Obama’s #epicfail against Mitt Romney in the first 2012 debate didn’t result in Willard moving into the White House. As a general matter, it’s fair to say, presidential debates create a ton of sound and fury, but portend precious little.

Of course, even before Fight Night in Philly last week between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, 2024 was different, and not just mildly or on the margins. Indeed, among historians, political scientists, analysts, experts, reporters, and pundits who’ve been around the block a time or two (or, in my case, heaven help me, eight), the first debate between Trump and Joe Biden in Atlanta in June was the most reverberative presidential cage match in the annals of the Republic—a debate that didn’t just move the needle but one that radically altered the trajectory of the entire election by setting off the chain reaction that drove Biden from the race.

For all the build-up ahead of Harris vs. Trump, few serious people imagined that last week’s debate could have that level of impact on the race, and even now, it’s almost certainly a stretch to claim that it will. But given what transpired that night in Philly—and, more to the point, the comprehensive and metastasizing meltdown that’s ensued within the Trump campaign, inside Mar-a-Lago’s sanctum sanctorum, among what remains of the G.O.P. establishment, in every corner of the MAGA-sphere, and, apparently, inside Trump’s head—there’s at least a chance that history may look back and judge that Harris-Trump in the Cradle of Liberty was at least in the same coliseum of consequence as Biden-Trump in Dogwood City.

Though the data from post-Philly polling that’s come in so far has been encouraging for Harris—in particular, take a look at the latest numbers from America’s most revered pollster, Ann Selzer, in Iowa of all places—we won’t have a clear picture of the immediate impact of the debate qua debate on the race until the middle of this week. But the picture of the post-debate self-immolation currently consuming Trump and his orbit is lucid, vivid, and awash in the most garish of Technicolor hues. Herewith, five images of total post-debate system failure, and why they might mean that, as Bill Kristol wrote in The Bulwark this weekend, “On June 27, Joe Biden lost his chance for a second term. … At this year’s second presidential debate, Trump most likely lost his chance for a second term.”

Eventually, about an hour after the debate, Trump himself traipsed into the spin room. The fact that it took so long was telling: Everyone remotely familiar with Trump’s M.O. knew that he’d spent that 60 minutes watching the coverage, and once he realized he was in trouble, decided it was time to plunge his physical corpus into the spin cycle. In the end, however, even for Trump, the task of spinning the unspinnable proved futile.

How else do you know that you’re losing the spin war? The first clue is when your camp tries to work the refs, and that of course was the first thing that Trump and a bunch of other conservatives did when they started attacking ABC News for having fact-checked Trump, etcetera. The second is when the post-debate coverage is mostly about you. Going into the debate, I was right there with the The New York Times and the conventional wisdom in thinking that, fairly or not, the debate would be all about Harris and would be covered as such. But within five minutes of the end of the debate, the conversation coalesced immediately around Trump and his implosion, and that’s been the case ever since—and even more so on TikTok and other platforms where the meme war has played out, with Trump’s pet-eating madness dominating the discussion all day and twice on Sunday.

But even before the debate, Trump was pissed at Chris and Susie because, in his mind, having built an entire campaign focused on President Biden, they should have anticipated it would be a mistake to debate Biden in June—creating the conditions that led to his Harris-related dumbfoundedness. Had the first debate taken place, per usual, after the national conventions, Trump could have mopped the floor with Biden (or, more accurately, Biden could have mopped the floor with himself) and Democrats would have been stuck with the result. Instead, Democrats were able to swap out Biden for a younger, more appealing, and much stronger rival.

What is now obvious in Trump’s conspiratorial mind is that Chris and Susie convinced him to focus his entire campaign on Biden on the premise that there was no way the Democratic Party would ever have the stones to depose him—thus leading to the fateful decision to accept the early debate. And as bad as it is that LaCivita and Wiles were wrong, making it even worse in Trump’s mind is that these were the supposed “experts” to whom he’s constantly being told to defer. Ever since Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket, the betting inside Trumpworld has been that either LaCivita, Wiles, or both would be shown the door. And according to a number of eyewitnesses from backstage at the Philly debate, their absence from the spin room didn’t go unnoticed by Trump: The vibes among them were dark and jittery, with Trump glowering at Chris and muttering in Susie’s general direction.

Trump, of course, has a well-known history of firing campaign managers in the summer. In 2016, he sacked Corey Lewandowski then, and in 2020, he did the same to Brad Parscale. Put the upper echelons of the Trump campaign on sodium pentothal, ask them for the odds that Chris and Susie will still be on the campaign come November 5, and here is what you’ll hear: less than 10 percent.

Loomer’s omnipresence at Trump’s side, along with countless photos showing the two of them with their hands all over each other, has given rise to rampant speculation over her relationship with Trump—Bill Maher uncorked a whole riff on it Friday night, which immediately went viral—and as I type this, The Drudge Report has a picture of the two of them above a handful of headlines reading This Is MAGA Love… Has He Found His Soulmate? Where is Melania?…

Even people like Thom Tillis, Lindsey Graham, and Marjorie Taylor Greene have been warning Trump that his proximity to Loomer will do irreparable damage to the campaign. The far, far, far right of the MAGA-sphere is spreading the narrative that she is a Democratic plant, and claiming that she herself is telling allies that she’s been giving Trump the “best blowjobs of his life.” It’s all incredibly tawdry, but the real question is how much damage Loomer is doing to Trump’s ability to stay focused on a message that might help him win the election—Loomer was a prime mover behind the Haitian cats-and-dogs-and-pets fiction—and the strife her presence is creating among Trump’s normally ride-or-die allies on the right. A public melee between M.T.G. and Loony Loomer may be a lot of things, but no serious Republican political player (or even many of the unserious ones surrounding Trump now, like Lewandowski) believe it will help Trump to reclaim Casa Blanca.

But ever since Harris became the de facto nominee, Trump has been verklempt. He’s been spinning out and spiraling and unable to maintain a coherent, linear approach to just about anything. I wrote a whole column about this called The Biden-ing of Donald Trump, and what happened on the debate stage on Tuesday night was the Biden-ing of Trump by a factor of 10.

Not only was he punished by the split screen with Harris, but he evinced all of Biden’s flaws with no greater degree of messaging discipline or focus or clarity. It’s notable that he didn’t achieve any of the directives he was supposed to achieve. He took the bait incessantly, and instead of talking about immigration he decided to talk about Harris’s crowd size, and that she was going to usher in World War III, and then he launched into the riff about dogs and pets being consumed by Haitian immigrants. In many ways, this is exactly what Biden did in June, when he was given an abortion question that was in his wheelhouse and he got lost in the middle of the answer, and ended up talking about immigration—a topic he, in fact, did not want to be talking about.

One of my longtime hobbyhorses is the decline of Trump’s mental acuity. It’s not that the guy hasn’t pulled it together—he’s unable to pull it together. He’s not rattled, undisciplined, or distracted—he’s dotty, demented, mentally diminished. That became undeniably clear on Tuesday night, when, on the biggest stage with the biggest stakes, Trump failed to move the ball forward a single inch on any of his political goals or strategic objectives. Among his staff, advisers, allies, and friends, the debate brought home his unraveling with a vengeance.

Outside of that, the one thing on the calendar that could move the race is the debate on October 1 between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. Normally, vice presidential debates don’t matter at all, but here we may find ourselves again in exceptions-prove-the-rule territory. Since joining the ticket, J.D. Vance has become a cultural touchstone: he’s a walking, talking, igniter of cultural heat, and that debate is going to be covered like crazy.

Then there are other things on the calendar that are not traditional campaign events but could move the needle. We are likely going to have an interest rate cut this week from the Federal Reserve, which is going to create a sense of optimism in the economy, which will in turn open the door for Harris to start driving her economic message, especially on housing. And on October 7, a week after the vice presidential debate, the Supreme Court starts its new term. There will be an incredible amount of focus on Dobbs and its fallout and the importance of the next president’s four years of judicial appointments, an issue on which Harris has the upper hand.

These upcoming calendar events will throw into further and starker relief the abject failure of Trump’s debate performance. With time running out on Trump’s capacity to move the ball, the opportunities for him are dwindling. Of course, none of this means that Harris is guaranteed to win—she certainly didn’t win the election on Tuesday night. But it’s striking that Trump’s debate debacle, like Biden’s in June, may turn out to have much longer legs than anyone imagined at first.