On paper, has there ever been a more qualified candidate for president than Mike Pence? Twelve years in the House of Representatives, four as governor of Indiana, and four as vice president of the United States. No president in at least the last 30 years has come to office with that kind of resume.

Starting in 2015, Donald Trump changed the scale of Republican primary politics. In Iowa, the first-voting state, Trump drew crowds that were not just bigger than anyone had seen before, but they also attracted lots of people who had never participated in the caucuses process. As Trump progressed, things got even bigger.

Back in 2021, President Joe Biden fought hard to win Senate confirmation for Rachael Rollins to become the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts. Rollins was the district attorney of Suffolk County, which includes Boston, and she had become notorious by pledging not to prosecute many crimes. Early in her term, she published the "Rollins Memo" that listed 15 crimes in which the "default is to decline prosecuting" — that is, in which her office would not allow its attorneys to prosecute unless a supervisor gave special permission.

There's a lot of media talk these days about the Republican "donor class" and its preferences in the 2024 GOP presidential race. That's natural at this stage of the contest, in part because 1) people with billions of dollars hold an outsize place in journalists' minds, 2) the political class, composed of candidates, consultants, officeholders, media, and other insiders see money as an important measure of a candidate's viability, 3) candidates kiss up to billionaires and lavish attention on them, and 4) most importantly, the voters haven't spoken yet.

For more than two years now, Republicans have been predicting that President Joe Biden's big-spending policies will crash the U.S. economy into recession. It hasn't happened yet, although the country did experience two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth, a widely accepted definition of a recession, in the first and second quarters of 2022. But the economy climbed back into positive growth territory in the next quarter and has stayed there since.

Recently, the NAACP issued what it calls a "formal travel advisory" to warn black people against visiting Florida. "Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals," the group said. "Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color."

Just last month, this newsletter covered the emergence of a whistleblower in the joint Justice Department-IRS investigation of President Joe Biden's son Hunter. The whistleblower was a career IRS criminal supervisory special agent who, according to his lawyer, could reveal "clear conflicts of interest" in the Biden investigation as well as "examples of preferential treatment and politics improperly infecting decisions and protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances if the subject were not politically connected."

For more than a year, professional golf has been engulfed in a civil war over money and politics. The cause has been the creation of a new tour, funded by the vastly wealthy government of Saudi Arabia, to challenge the dominance — some would say the monopoly — of the PGA Tour.

President Joe Biden was born on Nov. 20, 1942. That has been a well-known fact, or at least a widely available fact, since Biden entered national politics a half-century ago. The fact that Biden is 80 years old now, that he will be 82 when the next presidential term begins, and that he will be 86 when that term ends — all that has been known at all times surrounding Biden's campaigns and presidency.

There's an incredible amount of information in special counsel John Durham's new 306-page report on the disastrous misdeeds and mistakes committed by the FBI and other government agencies in the Trump-Russia investigation. Here is one of many fascinating episodes.