Aloha, habari za jioni, and welcome back to the Sunday edition of The Best & The Brightest, coming at you tonight per usual from Gotham City, where the Impolitic HQ hi-fi has been pumping out The Stranger, 52nd Street, and Glass Houses pretty much nonstop since Thursday night, when I was lucky enough to be among the nearly 19,000 fans to witness the 104th and final show of William Martin Joel’s epic, decade-long monthly residency (and his 150th show overall) at Madison Square Garden.

I’ll freely admit that, though I liked him fine, Billy wasn’t hard or loud or novel enough to be in my musical strike zone when I was coming up. But I’ll also say that, at this point, the guy is a definitive New York artist and a bona fide national treasure—and he absolutely stuck the landing the other night. And while the MSG residency is over, Billy’s not retiring; he’s got a handful of stadium gigs across the country this fall, and if you have a chance to catch one, here’s my advice: do it. You’ll thank me later.

By sheer coincidence, Billy’s grand finale at MSG took place four weeks to the day after a rather less bravura performance, on an even bigger stage, with far greater consequences: the debate debacle that triggered a cascading series of aftershocks that ultimately caused President Biden to exit the presidential election last Sunday and hand the baton to his understudy, Kamala Harris, to run the rest of the race against Donald Trump. With Democrats suddenly, deliriously reveling in their party’s rapid-fire and turmoil-free coalescence around the V.P.—and the unexpected outbreak of Momala Mania that came with it—tonight’s column turns away from the eye-popping, jaw-dropping, head-snapping past four weeks and looks ahead to the next four: specifically, to the pressing questions and titanic challenges facing Team K between now and the end of the Democratic convention on August 22.

But first…

🎧 Essential listening: In the wake of Biden’s stunning announcement that he was standing down, we scrambled the jets at Impolitic With John Heilemann and secured a pair of world-class guests to make sense of the decision and tease out its political implications: presidential historian Michael Beschloss and CBS News’s chief election and campaign correspondent, Robert Costa. If you haven’t already, you’re gonna want to listen here or here.

Then, in our Friday episode, we went deep on Kamala’s moment (including, yes, the 🥥 craze) with civil rights leader and former N.Y.C. mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, and took the measure of Biden’s decision to bow out and his Oval Office address with Tim Ryan, the former 10-term Ohio congressman, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and 2022 Buckeye State Senate candidate (where he overperformed but fell short in his underfunded race against J.D. Vance). Check out that one out here or here—I’ve heard on the grapevine that Charli XCX thinks this episode, too, is brat.

🤯 Meet the new Trump, same as the old Trump: The former president held two campaign rallies last week—the first in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Thursday, and the second in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on Saturday—in which he made it abundantly clear that his brush with death in Pennsylvania two weeks ago hasn’t changed him in the least. (In doing so, he also implicitly, albeit gleefully, mocked every reporter or pundit who lent any credibility to the New Trump bullshit being peddled by his adjutants during the Republican convention.) The speeches were endless, rambling, disjointed, and full of both inanities and insanities, providing ample evidence that Trump, himself, is experiencing significant cognitive decline. Which is to say, par for the course.

But there were telltale signs last week that Biden’s departure from the race and Harris’s ascension have poleaxed Trump, putting him on defense instead of letting him play offense, depriving him of the media oxygen he inhales like so much KFC. As is often the case, the sharpest-eyed decoders of Trump’s tantrums and tirades are the Times’s inimitable Haberman & Swan, and these pieces of theirs—one in print, under their joint byline, and one on video that’s just by Maggie—are essential to understanding what’s happening inside the bouffant-covered cranium of the former guy.

🙀 Hillbilly requiem: Anyone even remotely interested in politics is fully aware that Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate hasn’t proven to be, ahem, the cat’s pajamas. As the press unearths on-the-record statements and on-camera interviews that bolster Democratic arguments that he’s not merely outside the political mainstream or an ideological extremist, but even more damaging and just plain weird, I’m reminded of an expression to which David Plouffe introduced me around the time Obama was being pummeled over his association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright: “Every candidate gets his turn in the barrel,” Plouffe said. “This is ours.”

“Turn in the barrel” is a common phrase, but few people know its etymology, which I invite you to explore here (assuming you’re okay with reading a filthy joke). Linguistic derivation aside, there’s no denying J.D. is having his turn in ye olde barrel; I mean, good God, Steve Schmidt has deemed Vance the worst V.P. nomination of all time—worse even than Sarah Palin, the pick Schmidt had a hand in elevating in 2008, when he was John McCain’s chief strategist.

The question is how long Vance’s turn in the barrel will last, and whether Trump—who you just know privately agrees that Vance is weird as hell—will eventually drop him like a hot, hairy rock. In a normal election, the answer would be: like it or not, Trump will stick with Vance; dumping a running mate not long after choosing him would be sheer madness. But this is 2024, when the only rule of thumb is that any eventuality that appears implausible, inconceivable, or downright impossible is a lead-pipe certainty to occur. And if that logic holds, we may soon be hearing Trump spouting his most famous catchphrase—“J.D., you’re fired”—followed by a P.A. system somewhere ringing out, “Governor Burgum, white courtesy phone!”

And now to a V.P. pick that’s suddenly soaring, not swiftly sinking…

Among the Harris skeptics or critics who abound in Washington, the low expectations that greeted her fledgling candidacy were rooted in their dim assessments of her stint as V.P., her campaign’s dismal performance in the 2020 Democratic primary, and/or her time in the U.S Senate or as California’s attorney general. But even those in Democratic and political media circles with a more favorable view of Harris—including me—were taken aback by how smoothly she and her people were able to navigate the terrain in front of them last week.

As anyone who’s spent time running, working on, or covering presidential campaigns will tell you, even the most disciplined, well-oiled operations are prone to make unforced errors, and not infrequently. Even candidates who are terrific political athletes commit their share of mess-ups, especially when the events unfolding around them are unexpected, fast-moving, or the least bit chaotic. Given the unprecedented, unpredictable, and unpredicted nature of what went down before Harris took the field, and the off-the-chain spontaneity of what unspooled immediately thereafter, every top campaign veteran I’ve checked in with (no short list, that) would have regarded a mistake-free first week as a remarkable achievement—and were truly gobsmacked by the sight of Kamala & Co. going well beyond the mere absence of blunders and knocking the freaking cover off the ball.

To wit: Since Harris’s coronation, enthusiasm among Democratic voters has surged, closing the energy gap with the G.O.P., according to a new gWall Street Journal poll, which also found that, consistent with fresh numbers from the Times/Siena College survey, Harris has already erased the lead Donald Trump had opened up over Joe Biden nationwide, and she is running considerably ahead of Biden with Black, Latino, and young voters. Money has poured in at a staggering clip: $200 million since Harris took the reins, with 66 percent of that dough coming from first-time donors, per the campaign. On the stump, the presumptive nominee was strong, assured, and at times electrifying. On TikTok and other social media platforms, she was more than that: a genuine phenomenon—as vividly evinced by the sight of countless codger-pundits asking bewilderedly why being brat was a good thing?

Now comes the hard part: capitalizing on and sustaining the Momala Mania that Harris’s candidacy has unleashed within her party, while at the same time introducing her to the broader electorate—and especially to the same single-digit-percent cadre of undecided, persuadable voters in the same six or seven swing states where the battle was being waged by Team Biden before the debate debacle began to expand the map for Team Trump—and defusing the oncoming Republican onslaught aimed at defining her as unacceptable, unqualified, or otherwise unfit to occupy the Oval Office. In other words, on the face of it, the central strategic question facing Team K is straightforward: Can it keep the Harris Honeymoon going and build on that foundation?

Scratch the surface and the answers turn out to be fiendishly complex. With just 100 days until the polls open on November 5, and a mere 21 before the Democratic convention kicks off on August 19, Team K finds itself undertaking a presidential campaign with a shape and tempo unlike any that’s come before: a race for the White House that isn’t a marathon but instead a sprint. The mad-dash quality of the contest carries with it distinct advantages for Harris. But right now, it places an extraordinary degree of pressure on her and her team, which has a vast number of big and crucial things to do (and do right) or deal with (and deal with effectively) in the scarily short period of time between today and day one at the convention in Chicago.

One enormous asset bestowed on Harris by Biden’s endorsement is that, rather than having to build a national organization—from battleground state field operations to a digital team to a grassroots and high-dollar fundraising machine—she is instead inheriting the existing one, more or less lock, stock, and barrel. Another is that, in addition to the money she is currently raising hand over fist, she can legally lay claim to the roughly $250 million in cash sitting in the Biden-Harris kitty. And still another is that, although there will need to be extensive modifications made to the convention program that would have been unfurled had Biden remained the nominee, those changes will be handled by the same Democratic strategist who was in charge before (and who ran Biden’s notably successful and highly innovative 2020 virtual convention): the formidable and indefatigable Stephanie Cutter.

Even so, every high-level Democratic strategist, campaign manager, ad maker, and pollster with presidential campaign experience I’ve spoken to these past few days regards the next three weeks as both pivotal and highly precarious for Harris. Team Trump has clearly telegraphed its intent to drop a metric ton of negative ads on Harris’s head in the battleground states during this period—with the goal of killing her candidacy in the crib before she and her party baptize the baby on national TV in the Windy City. The Trump game plan is as familiar as it has been brutally effective in the annals of modern presidential campaign history. The same playbook was used by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes to destroy Mike Dukakis with Willie Horton (and the pledge of allegiance, and his membership in the ACLU) in the summer of 1988. And it was again by Trump campaign co-manager Chris LaCivita to slice John Kerry into ribbons with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the summer of 2004.

To those at the highest levels of the collective Democratic brain trust, the key to avoiding that fate and instead extending the Harris Honeymoon as long as possible—and, who knows, maybe all the way to November 5—is for Team K to engage in some carefully calibrated, ruthlessly executed, and rapid-fire tactical triage: not sweating the sheer volume of items on its pre-convention to-do list but rather focusing on the small handful of items that are absolutely essential to get right, and then, you know, getting them right.

And what items exactly does the Democratic brain trust see as absolutely essential? Glad you asked, as I have the list right here, and I’ll be laying it out in Part 2 of this column—coming at you in a special Wednesday edition of The Best & The Brightest: Impolitic. See you then, and always, namaste.