Trump Pitches Products Over His Campaign

“If Donald Trump is defeated in next month’s election, the Republican Party will face a reckoning unprecedented in modern political history,” Axios reports. “Never before has a party’s identity been so deeply entwined with the fate, fortunes and flaws of one man. Four consecutive poor election cycles would unleash a wave of sustained scrutiny that the GOP — as it currently exists — may not survive.”

“Candidates backed by Jair Bolsonaro are pulling ahead in municipal elections that are considered a barometer of political sentiment in Brazil, two years before a presidential vote in which Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will likely seek another term,” Bloomberg reports.

John Heilemann: “One result of this utterly unimaginable, genuinely bonkers chain of events is that both the Harris and Trump campaigns, the press, and voters are already hyper-attuned to the outlandish craziness of this election year and have been conditioned, in a way, to consider stunning, unprecedented turns of events par for the course in 2024.

Gov. Tim Walz will be virtually sitting down with the SmartLess podcast Monday, Deadline reports. “Walz, who is also appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live tomorrow, will hold a Zoom conversation with the popular podcast hosts, actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett. The interview is set to air sometime in the next week or so, according to sources.”

“Vice President Kamala Harris will mark Monday’s one-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel at her Naval Observatory residence, where, along with second gentleman Doug Emhoff, she’ll plant a memorial tree,“ CNN reports. “Second families have traditionally planted trees on the grounds of the vice president’s residence. Monday’s planting of a pomegranate tree — which, among other things, represents hope and righteousness in Judaism — will mark the first for Harris and Emhoff while they’ve been at the residence.”

“Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer known as the ‘Merchant of Death,’ walked out of a U. S. jail almost two years ago in a trade with Moscow for U. S. basketball star Brittney Griner,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Now he is back in business, trying to broker the sale of small arms to Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants.”