Freddy Gray

Kamala Harris has been criticising Donald Trump for ducking interviews. Today, however, she avoided a sit-down with the Economic Club of Chicago. Trump, by contrast, showed up and spent an hour facing difficult questions from Bloomberg News’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait. It was, like all the best Trump appearances, a magnificently weird occasion. Who needs LSD when you can watch him as a presidential candidate, eight years in, still melting reality live on YouTube? If Kamala Harris speaks in confusing word salads, Trump speaks in even more baffling fruit jellies Micklethwait is a brilliant man: polished, Ampleforth and Oxford, highly successful. His hair is coiffed and his loafers look expensive.

As Hurricane Milton battered Florida last week, Kamala Harris did her best to look and sound presidential. The Vice President hosted a live broadcast with the leadership of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She then called into CNN, live, to reassure Americans that her administration was tackling the crisis. The message was meant to be clear: she’s got this.  Alas, Joe Biden also wanted to show that he’s in charge and that muddled matters. On Friday, the actual Commander-in-Chief gave an emergency press conference about the disaster from the White House briefing room, which rather overshadowed Harris’s big rally that day in the critical swing state of Michigan.

‘Some things are more important than staying in power,’ Joe Biden just told the United Nations, and the General Assembly broke into sustained applause. Biden left the stage clasping his hand to his chest, so touched that he had so touched the crowd.  ‘It’s your people that matter the most,’ said Biden. ‘Never forget we are here to serve the people. Not the other way around.’ It says quite a lot about the state of modern political leadership that such remarks are construed as moving insight.  Let’s try to put aside how bogus Biden’s departing shtick is. The truth, which we all know, is that he spent the best part of four years refusing to admit that he was too old to serve effectively as America’s Commander-in-Chief.

A day after nearly being shot again, the 78-year-old Donald Trump is once more being mocked for sounding like a fool while talking about cryptocurrency. In an interview with Farokh Sarmad, another of these hugely popular male influencers whom the vast majority of people have never heard of, Trump ruminated on the importance of making America the ‘crypto capital’ of the planet.  Sitting in Mar-a-Lago, underneath the hilariously kitsch ‘Visionary’ portrait of young Donald in white trousers and a tennis jumper, Trump told the Persian-Canadian Farokh that he learns about crypto from his sons. ‘Barron is a young guy,’ he said. ‘He's got four wallets or something. I'm saying "explain this to me". He knows it so well. And Eric and Don. I have a lot of respect for them.

As if there hadn’t been enough drama in America in 2024, Donald Trump has survived another assassination attempt. The attempted killing of the 45th president at his golf course in Palm Beach, Florida yesterday afternoon was not nearly as threatening or deadly as the shooting nine weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania, which so nearly ended Trump's life, killed a spectator and injured others. The Secret Service, who have faced so much criticism for their failings in Butler, found the would-be killer’s weapon before he was able to target Trump, shots were fired, and the suspect appears to have been arrested fleeing the scene. Nobody was seriously harmed. What took place in Florida will show voters that a lot of people want Trump dead It’s still big news, though.