Other Biden appointees included the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, the curator Nora Halpern, the actors George Clooney, Jennifer Garner and Kerry Washington, the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, the screenwriter and producer Shonda Rhimes and Steve Israel, a former US representative for New York.
In 2018, an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” described internal efforts to curb the President’s impulses, and became a book the following year, “A Warning.” The author eventually revealed himself as Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
During Trump’s Presidency, she didn’t speak publicly very often—“There is absolutely no question that she has been quieter than any modern First Lady we’ve known,” the Washington Post’s Mary Jordan, who has written a biography of Melania, said, in 2020—and even when she did make a rare address, such as the speech she gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention, some of her words were revealed to have been lifted from Michelle Obama.
Her suggestion that voters pay attention to his rallies, and note how many attendees left early “out of exhaustion and boredom,” prompted the Republican to inveigh against the nonexistent pet-eating migrants; and a well-timed reminder that Trump had inherited a large fortune, during an exchange about Harris’s recent move to the center, distracted him from what otherwise might have been an effective attack on her flip-flopping.
This past Saturday, two hours after a twenty-year-old Pennsylvania man with hazy political commitments and uncertain motives tried to kill Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, a Republican from Ohio, typed out a reaction on social media: “Today is not just some isolated incident.
His approval rating is a net ten points worse than it was in November, 2022 when inflation was much much higher and when he didn’t have the benefit of running against Donald Trump, who since then has been indicted on many charges, and has also been convicted of crimes in New York.
