Why is this happening?

More and more people are asking: "Why is this happening?" Maybe you're one of them. Maybe you're asking: Why is our country seriously considering electing Donald Trump president again? Or maybe you're asking: Why am I getting this email from Josh?

They're both good questions, but I'll start with the second one, because it's easier. With the 2024 presidential election a month away, I'm launching a daily newsletter to help you stay on top of the big developments in the race, as well as in the country and world more broadly. Let me tell you about it, and then we'll get to the first question (which, frankly, I am confused and bewildered by too).

Is this daily newsletter for you?

This newsletter is for people who know important stuff is happening, but don't have time to follow all of it. People who use the internet but are not "very online" and do not want to be. (You shouldn't want to be very online—I am, and it's terrible.) It's also for people who aren't sure which news stories they can trust, and why they should trust those stories. Along with a longer post most days, I'll put together a quick roundup of news worth knowing, fleshed out with a little bit of context, but not enough to make you bored.

In keeping with that ethos, this newsletter will also cover things that aren't politics: television, music, parenting, therapy, cats, and sex, for example—although rarely cats and sex at the same time. It's called "Having a Normal One" partly because the United States of America is absolutely not doing that right now, but also because it's for people who want to be better informed about politics without making politics their entire life.

If that's you, go here and subscribe. There's a seven-day free trial, and then it's $3 a month, or $33 if you want to subscribe for a whole year at once and get one month free. (If that's not you, you're still allowed to subscribe, and it would be great if you did. I could use the money.) "Having a Normal One" comes out daily Monday through Friday, except for federal holidays and my birthday.

Okay, now the politics

Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's nominee for president in July, after incumbent President Joe Biden dropped out of the race due to concerns about his age (he'll be 82 next month) and mental fitness (he looked and sounded really out of it when he debated Republican nominee Donald Trump on June 27). Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, have run what I'd call a pretty great campaign so far! And yet the polls have consistently shown that she is basically neck and neck with Trump regardless.

If you're reading this, there's a decent chance you already know it anyway, so there's no sense in sugarcoating my feelings about Trump: He was a con artist and criminal before he was elected president in 2016. In office, he conducted himself so abominably that he is the only U.S. president to have been impeached twice. Earlier this year, he became the only former president convicted of felony charges. And he's still indicted on federal charges and on state charges in Georgia.

Many of you will recall that Trump also incited his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, hoping to prevent members of Congress from formalizing Biden's victory over him in the 2020 election. Since that loss, Trump and his allies in the Republican Party have claimed he was the victim of election fraud, but failed to produce any evidence whatsoever of that. (By December 2020, they had already lost almost 60 lawsuits contesting the election results, some heard by judges Trump appointed himself.) Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, among other Republican leaders, have not agreed to accept the results of next month's election either.

But listen: Even if we overlook the cons and the crimes and the pathological lying and his burning desire to overthrow the U.S. government, Trump was just a bad president.

Why is anyone voting for this man?

What did he accomplish? He appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, but any Republican president could have done that (and would have). He signed off on tax cuts in 2017—including corporate tax cuts that yielded minimal results and have not even come close to paying for themselves, thus increasing the federal deficit—but again, any Republican president would have done the same, and Trump certainly had no hand in shaping the legislation. Despite repeated promises, he never pulled off Infrastructure Week. He didn't repeal Obamacare. He didn't even manage to hang Mike Pence. Mostly, he just tweeted a lot of stupid and offensive bullshit, which he could have done just as easily from anywhere that wasn't the White House.

Now, Trump is 78, even more hateful, utterly consumed with staying out of prison and wreaking vengeance on all the people he considers his enemies, and quite possibly feebleminded. (For some reason, the news media seems a lot less worried about his mental fitness than it was about Biden's.) If he gets into the White House again, he's not going to achieve jack shit that will help you or anyone else. He'll just rubber-stamp a bunch of Project 2025 policies from the same crowd responsible for terrific ideas like adding windows to high school restrooms, to watch teenagers use the bathroom.

Obviously, though, some folks—perhaps even some of you—feel differently. And I'd like to know why! I mean that. One of the things I'd love to do with this newsletter is get a better firsthand sense of what exactly makes people—people I know aren't stupid—want to trust Donald Trump with the job of president, especially for the second time. Because even if the polls are off (and there's lots of reasons to think they are), too many Americans do trust him. And in a saner world, I'm quite sure almost no one would. Email me at joshwimmer@gmail.com if you're planning to vote for Trump and want to shed some light on that.

That'll do it for today. We'll be back Monday, and if you don't want to miss it, please do subscribe. It's just $3 a month—read more about it.