Hello and welcome back to my private email! I’ve already started my Thanksgiving travel and bopped off to Italy (my family and I are calling it “Grazie-sgiving”) and not a moment too soon: this was, finally, finally the week that Donald Trump announced he was running for president in 2024. If you’d asked me a year ago whether there was a chance anyone would be able to challenge his supremacy within the MAGA movement, much less the G.O.P., I probably would have said “no”. And then he decided to endorse Mehmet Oz, the Ivy League professor-turned-media elite—the least MAGA person imaginable—and it all went downhill from there. My assessment of the current field of challengers is below, and, my lord, I cannot believe there are challengers.

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The Chris Christie Flu

Ok, so Trump is running for president—duh—which means that now everyone else can feel free to toss their hat in the ring after his wan demi-coronation. But how can the other guys avoid a case of the Christies?

TINA NGUYEN

It’s rare that you see Fox News cut away from the biggest news event in Republican politics. Roughly 40 minutes into Donald Trump’s announcement that he was running for president again, a glittery affair at Mar-a-Lago scheduled during primetime, Sean Hannity came back on the air to talk to Fox and Friends weekend host Pete Hegseth and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee—hardly the A-team of Fox News—while Trump was consigned to picture-in-picture. Well into the 10 p.m. hour, Laura Ingraham ran her show over the muted live footage of Trump rambling about “Marxists,” executing drug dealers and referring obliquely to QAnon “storm” rhetoric. The New York Post, which was once all in for Trump, consigned the announcement to page 26.

It was quite a difference from 2016, or even 2020. CNN, which made Trump the focal point of years of frenzied coverage, stopped carrying the speech after 25 minutes; the networks didn’t air it at all. At Mar-a-Lago...

FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT

S.B.F. Blast Radius

Inside the frenzied scramble to create distance from the now-radioactive donor.

TEDDY SCHLEIFER

Streaming vs. TV

A close look at the streamers starting to experiment with live programming. 

JULIA ALEXANDER

Putin’s Retreat

The realpolitik behind the Ukrainian recapture of Kherson.

JULIA IOFFE

The Welch Chronicles

An excerpt from ‘Power Failure: The Rise of an American Icon.’

WILLIAM D. COHAN