The most important days of the 2024 presidential election have occurred in just the past three weeks

If you paid no attention to any of this, well, you did it right.

That’s because the most important days of the 2024 presidential election have occurred in just the past three weeks. Few weeks can even rival them in the nation’s history. If Joe Biden indeed drops out of the contest in the coming days, as party leaders are asking him to do, the race essentially faces a hard reset. Much of what has been said and done in the past three years, including the anti-Biden rhetoric of this week’s Republican National Convention, would suddenly become irrelevant.

Nothing before June 27 turned out to be that relevant in the first place to changing the structure of the contest. This has been the most stable presidential contest in modern history. The race was statistically tied. The feelings about both men are ingrained in the American zeitgeist.

Since June 27, things began to change. A CBS News national poll released on Thursday shows Trump breaking out into a lead outside the margin of error for the first time.

Let’s consider all that has happened in the past 22 days.

The presidential debate on June 27 will go down in American history as one of the worst performances by a presidential candidate ever. Sure, candidates have done poorly before, but none so poorly that party leaders felt compelled to mount an effort to push a sitting president to quit the race.

The immunity decision, released on July 1, rewrites the basic guardrails of power in the American presidency. It determined that most things a president does in office are off-limits for prosecution as long as they can be argued to be official acts.

Last week’s NATO summit in Washington was meant to be a celebratory gathering for the 75th anniversary of the military alliance. Instead, it served to crystallize all that is potentially at stake for the future of the world’s leadership and, specifically, Biden’s mental ability to do his job. A press conference last week did little to stop more calls from Democratic members of Congress asking Biden to resign.

On Saturday, there was an attempt on Trump’s life less than 10 minutes into a speech he was giving at a rally in Butler, Pa. It was the first attempt on a president, in this case, a former one, in 43 years.

While we didn’t know this until days later, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries reportedly told Biden in separate conversations last Saturday that he needed to get out of the race because he was hurting their chances to win Democratic majorities in both chambers.

On Monday, the Trump-appointed federal judge overseeing the trial in Florida ruled the case could not go forward based on one line of argument from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the immunity ruling.

Also on Monday, Vance, an Ohio senator, became one of the youngest vice presidential candidates in history at the age of 39. Given that Trump could only serve as president for another four years, Trump essentially handed the keys to his MAGA movement to a new leader when he leaves the stage.

On Wednesday Biden tested positive for COVID. It’s not the first time Biden contracted COVID. He also got it in July 2022. But this development essentially kicks him off the campaign trail and at a time when he was trying to show he could keep a robust schedule and perform well.

James Pindell can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @jamespindell and on Instagram @jameswpindell.