Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
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This week, in Manhattan, Donald Trump’s trial will continue. He will also be campaigning, a little unusually, in New Jersey on Saturday, near Cape May.
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Cease-fire talks regarding Israel and Gaza are continuing, and that remains front and center for national politics, particularly for President Biden. Also, as she is doing quite often, Vice President Kamala Harris will be doing a campaign event on Wednesday focused on abortion in Pennsylvania.
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Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she’ll try to oust the House speaker, Mike Johnson, this week after he helped pass the foreign aid package last month. Democrats have said they will help him out because he helped pass that package, which would really cement the unusual nature of the Congress we have. It’s functionally a coalition government, as Brendan Buck recently wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion.
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Over the weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to the Gestapo and said Democrats “get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that” during a fund-raiser, as Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher reported.
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Toward the end of Maggie and Shane’s article, they report that Trump campaign officials told donors that the 2024 race has only three swing states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Trump campaign officials also showed donors an “expanded reality” map that included Minnesota and Virginia, neither of which has received much attention this year.
Their inclusion here could be a couple different things. First, maybe they’ve polled and really see something in those states; the electoral map can change, as when Democrats won Georgia in 2020. Second, sometimes campaigns will spend money in less apparently competitive states primarily to require opponents to divert resources from a more competitive state.
But as a note on Virginia: Insofar as Republicans have done better there since 2020, it’s probably because people like Glenn Youngkin have been able to balance appealing to voters who do and don’t like Trump, while also turning frustrations with public school closings during the pandemic into a revived social conservatism. As time has gone on, though, voter enthusiasm for that social conservatism seems to have waned, as Jamelle Bouie has argued.
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Lastly, Gov. Kristi Noem’s book is being released this week, and at this point, it feels like anything could be in it.