CHICAGO — Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes” at Democrats’ convention here while making a suggestive hand gesture — a throwback to Trump’s old squabbling with a GOP rival about the measurements of his hands and other anatomy.

Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) declared Trump “fubar,” using a crude military acronym to label him an unsalvageable candidate, while Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker suggested Trump was inflating his wealth and said, “Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity.”

And multiple speakers delighted the crowd by alluding to the fabricated viral claim that Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, wrote in his memoir about having sex with furniture. “I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. “I know a couch commando when I see one,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later.

The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line “When they go low, we go high” — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations, after years of invective that has at times been racist and sexist — some Democrats said they are tired of being polite.

Charlene Ligon, 75, a delegate from Nebraska, said when asked about Obama’s crowd size line: “I think that we’re getting in Trump’s head.” She said she talks to many younger Democrats who want a sharper tone against Trump.

“They really like the idea of taking it back to the opponent,” Ligon said.

Democrats have long wrestled with how to go after Trump, trying strategies ranging from ignoring or dismissing him, as some tried to do early in the 2016 race, to President Joe Biden’s argument that he presents a threat to democracy. This year’s convention culminated recent efforts to needle Trump on topics known to strike a nerve in the former president.

That shift is evident in prominent Democrats repeatedly calling Trump “weird,” an attack vice-presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz helped popularize; the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s presidential nominee, embracing a fight with Trump over crowd sizes; and prominent Democrats, including Walz, referencing the false couch story about Vance in speeches and internet memes, after years of their party decrying the spread of misinformation.

Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement that Harris is “running from her years of failed and dangerously liberal policies in the White House that have hurt our country” and that Trump “has an America First agenda to secure our border, restore a thriving economy to make life affordable again, and use peace through strength to bring back stability around the world. ”

For her part, Harris took a somber tone against Trump in her Thursday night speech, at times directly challenging his character. She called Trump an “unserious man” and said, “the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” She noted Trump’s role on Jan. 6, his fraud conviction in New York and a jury finding of liability for sexual abuse and steered clear of anything crass — as Trump mocks her name and laugh and baselessly questions her racial identity.

But other convention speakers were “kind of hitting below the belt more than usual,” said Simona Jones, 29, an employee at a racial justice nonprofit who attended with colleagues. “Republicans do it all the time.”

“They’re calling him weird,” she added, “but they’re not, like, body-shaming him.”

She paused and rethought her remark. “I guess Obama kind of did!” she said. Next to her, a colleague burst out laughing.

Democrats advanced a multipronged case against Trump at the convention designed to energize their base, win persuadable independents and peel off some former Republicans. They cast him as focused on himself rather than the country and called attention to his record on labor issues; the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters; and his nomination of Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Harris and her allies have been spotlighting those themes in paid advertising, contrasting her positions on those topics and promoting her as a steward of personal freedoms.

Former first lady Michelle Obama said Harris’s opponents were “doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas” and criticized Trump more bluntly than she did in her 2016 and 2020 convention speeches. She alluded to Trump’s years-long, false suggestion that the first Black U.S. president was born in Africa.

“His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happened to be Black,” she said.

“Going small is never the answer,” she said later.

But some convention attendees said they detected a willingness to go after Trump in new and less dignified ways, after years of Biden mostly sticking to sober criticisms of Trump’s behavior, especially his disregard for democratic norms.

Trump made clear this week that he was listening to Democrats’ jabs. At a Monday rally in Pennsylvania he repeated his objections to Democrats labeling him and Vance “weird,” saying, “I think we’re extremely normal people.” At another rally on Wednesday in North Carolina, he brought Obama up and called his comments “very nasty.”

“Did you see Barack Hussein Obama last night, taking little shots?” Trump said, returning to his habit of using Obama’s middle name in what many view as a dog whistle meant to falsely portray Obama as foreign. He added, “They always say, sir, please stick to policy. Don’t get personal. And yet they’re getting personal all night long.” He polled his own crowd: “Do I still have to stick to policy?”

“Noooo!” they shouted.

On Thursday morning, Trump called in to “Fox & Friends” with thoughts on Walz’s speech.

“I have to listen to a lightweight like this get up and absolutely lie,” he lamented.

Democrats made fun of Trump throughout the convention. They joked about his repeated references to the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, the suggestions that he fell asleep during his criminal trial (Trump vehemently denied it) and the diagnosis that exempted Trump from military service in Vietnam. “I don’t have bone spurs,” Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore said after recounting how he joined the Army.

The audience broke out in some chants of “lock him up!” — a reference to the “lock her up!” chants that Trump supporters aimed at then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. It was a gleeful reference to Trump’s conviction this spring on 34 felony counts; he has yet to be sentenced and faces many other outstanding charges. Harris has brushed aside occasional “lock him up!” chants at her rallies, saying, “We’re gonna let the courts handle that” — but Clinton gave a smile when they popped up during her speech this week.

Former president Bill Clinton took aim at Trump’s age, a topic where Democrats were once on the defensive with Biden. “I’m still younger than Donald Trump!” the 78-year-old said. The crowd loved it.

Trump spent the week trying to wrest attention away from Chicago with appearances in battleground states. On Thursday, the final day of the convention, he live-posted through Harris’s speech on social media.

The former president and his advisers suggested that Democrats are focused on Trump at the expense of other issues such as inflation. Democrats said say they are doing two things at once — making a case against Trump but also laying out a positive vision.

Still, Democrats acknowledge that few things unite the party like opposition to Trump. “Donald Trump has served as one of the best motivators for the Democratic Party and our base and activists,” said Joe Caiazzo, a delegate from Massachusetts.

But not everyone felt compelled to focus on him.

At a Wednesday afternoon gathering for delegates under 35, speakers barely mentioned Trump, focusing instead on their policy dreams for the party — on housing costs, health care, climate change and the Israel-Gaza war.

Sungkwan Jang, a 34-year-old New Jersey delegate who helped organize the event, borrowed a line from former Republican House speaker Paul D. Ryan later in an interview: “I think we all understand that we’re not an opposition party, we’re a proposition party.”

He did note something that made him especially angry: Trump’s repeated mispronunciations of Harris’s first name, which some Harris supporters see as racist and demeaning.

Jang said he is “trying to channel” that anger.

It is probably an understatement to say that the speeches during which each major party’s presidential candidate accepted their nominations differed dramatically.

Former president Donald Trump’s was long, often diverging from his prepared comments to offer a rambling aside about himself or his campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris’s, by contrast, was tightly crafted and delivered — and, thankfully for people staying up on the East Coast, relatively short.

You are by now probably broadly familiar with the rhythms and rhetoric of the two candidates (or, at least, one of them). As such, you should have no difficulty with the quiz below, in which you are presented with a series of quotes from the candidates’ speeches. Can you identify which candidate offered which sentiment?

Perhaps you found this quiz to be unexpectedly easy. That is probably less a function of our quote selections than it is of the wide difference in style between the two candidates.

It might also be the quote selection.

CHICAGO — It was not yet 9 a.m. Tuesday, but Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was moving fast through the labyrinth of delegate breakfasts at a hotel near the Democratic National Convention. First Tennessee, then Pennsylvania, a sprint downstairs for Wyoming and Montana, then back up to New Mexico and over to North Carolina. In less than two hours, she would speak to eight breakfasts covering 11 states while snapping hundreds of selfies in photo lines run by her staff with ruthless efficiency.

The quadrennial Democratic gathering can be where White House dreams get made, as Barack Obama showed in a 2004 speech that transformed him from an unknown Illinois state senator into a star. In Chicago this week, Whitmer set the pace for the Democrats’ bench of potential White House aspirants who found their ambitions frozen by President Joe Biden’s decision to terminate his reelection campaign and elevate Vice President Kamala Harris. It now may be four years — if not eight — before any of them reveal their true aspirations. But they were all here, hustling, mingling, striving — and practically tripping over one another in the process.

Former president Bill Clinton in his convention speech Wednesday described the presidential campaign as the “greatest job interview for the greatest job in the world.” The selfie lines this week, the get-to-know you speeches, the countless grab-and-grin meetings behind closed doors were all part of the less-glamorous courtship of party officials that is well underway to ensure that job interview happens.

Before Harris was coronated by Democrats as Biden’s successor, leaders like Whitmer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, Georgia Sen. Raphael G. Warnock and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker were informally known to some as the “Class of 2028.” It was a marker for the next presidential year when everyone had assumed Democrats would have an open primary. If Harris succeeds in winning in November, they could be the Class of 2032. But in Chicago they were taking it in stride, using their talents to pump up rank-and-file Democrats for Harris and ribbing former president Donald Trump, her Republican opponent.

The only safe play for all of them is being “the best, most hardworking surrogate you can possibly be. And if you’re from Pennsylvania, Michigan — deliver your state,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama.

Whitmer’s speech to Pennsylvania delegates Monday came just after that of Shapiro, who was among Harris’s top choices to be her running mate. At the breakfast held by the first-in-the-nation primary state of South Carolina, Whitmer literally crossed paths to the microphone with Warnock.

As Warnock looked on — perhaps sizing up his future competition — Whitmer rallied her “party of happy warriors” in shimmery platform Converse, dark rinse jeans and a pink plaid blazer pinned with a button that said “Wear pink, get s— done.”

“Hit the doors. Register voters. Eat a damn vegetable on occasion,” Whitmer ordered Tuesday morning. “When you get home on Friday, take a nap, and then roll up your sleeves and put on your chucks, and let’s do the work.”

Then she was back out the door as her chief of staff marshaled her selfie line into formation in the booming voice of a former teacher. “She’s going to come right behind you and get in every photo. Have your phone up and ready to go. Look like me,” JoAnne Huls said with an outstretched arm, pantomiming holding a cellphone camera high above her head. Whitmer darted down the line with a smile plastered to her face, popping her head into frame behind each shoulder. “Let’s go!” Huls shouted, keeping things moving. “We’re Detroiters. We make things. We make lines. We make photos. It’s an assembly line at its best!”

As Shapiro was about to take the stage at the “real freedom happy hour” he hosted at a Chicago art gallery Monday, former Obama strategist Jim Messina observed that for all the Democratic hopefuls, the next 70-something days offer an instance where hard work on behalf of the Harris-Walz ticket is not only “great politics for your political future” but “also the right thing to do.” But that alignment does not make the waiting game any less awkward.

Newsom — whose fate has been inextricably intertwined with Harris’s since the two began rising together in San Francisco political circles decades ago — maintained a notably low profile in Chicago after spending much of the year as one of Biden’s most visible surrogates.

As the California governor adjusts to a dramatically changed political landscape, this moment has echoes of a similar collision of ambitions in 2015, when a U.S. Senate seat opened for the first time in two decades. Harris ran; Newsom opted out and ultimately forged a different path to become governor. This week, he did not deliver a formal speech from the stage, opting for the more pedestrian role of awarding California’s votes to Harris from the convention floor during a ceremonial roll call of the 50 states.

“I know my status. … I’m Harris 2024, Harris 2028, Harris or bust,” Newsom said when asked about how her ascent has affected his own thinking about a White House run. “I’m all in. I’ve been on this train for a long time — from the Senate to everything else. It’s pretty simple.”

Shapiro also demurred on questions about his future while courting hundreds of delegates, donors and party influencers on the sun-splashed lawn of the gallery in Chicago’s West Loop. Guests took photos in front of a giant American flag elaborately constructed from Pennsylvania-themed cans of Utz potato chips and Heinz ketchup. There were hors d’oeuvres from every region of the country, including a quinoa salad with golden raisins, shrimp and grits, Chicago dogs and “mini Americana shortcake parfaits” in glass shooters with tiny spoons.

But Shapiro’s fans were on the hunt for convention swag that might turn into collectibles. Some guests asked how they could get the black enamel “48” lapel pins that aides were wearing as one attendee noted that they could denote a potential Shapiro run to be the 48th president of the United States. (Clearing up the confusion, Shapiro’s aides said the pins signify that he’s the 48th governor of the commonwealth).

“I know you’re not going to believe this, but I really don’t think about it,” Shapiro said in a brief interview outside the party when asked about his White House intentions. “I have always believed that if you do good work, if you put in the effort, if you show results for people, the politics tends to take care of itself.”

Shapiro’s party was posh, but it was no match for the extravagant affair thrown Tuesday by Pritzker, the billionaire Illinois governor and heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune who used his wealth and influence to convince party officials to let him host the convention in his home state.

He was one of the most visible figures in Chicago — sitting at the elbow of Hillary Clinton during her husband’s convention speech and throwing his gala for 8,000 people with at least a dozen open bar spaces, acrobats in lit-up costumes, at least four options for frozen cocktails and a performance by singer-songwriter John Legend.

Thursday morning, Pritzker was trying out a version of what could eventually become a presidential stump speech before the delegates of Nevada, a state that hosts one of the nation’s first primary contests. He acknowledged that his state’s voters were probably not “looking for a White, Ukrainian American who is a Jewish billionaire” when he first ran in 2017, but said he had used his years in office to champion the “fight for personal freedoms.”

In addition to ensuring the funding for the Democratic convention in Chicago, Pritzker has been building goodwill within his party by providing more than $2.5 million in financial backing, as well as strategic support, for ballot measures to codify abortion rights in Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Montana through his Think Big America nonprofit.

After he left the Nevada breakfast to chants of “JB! JB! JB!,” Lindsey Harmon, who is executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes Nevada, stood up to tell delegates how Pritzker had “stepped up in an unbelievable way” — prompting a fresh round of applause.

Pritzker wound down his hosting duties on the last afternoon of the convention by taking Moore, another rising star within the Democratic Party, to The Wieners Circle — a hot dog joint known for its salty language.

After ordering two char dogs, they shot content for their social media feeds and bantered about the stand’s “Trump Footlong” — a three-inch hot dog whose name mocked the former president’s penchant for exaggerations. Out back, Pritzker talked Moore into doing a shot of Malört, a Chicago liqueur that he has dubbed the unofficial drink of the convention.

“You’re tough, you were in the military. You’ve done this a lot,” Pritzker said Moore.

“Nah, I don’t know about that. The last time I did this in public, my wife kicked me out of the house,” Moore replied.

“No faces,” Pritzker said as they toasted to democracy.

When a reporter noted that the footage of them taking shots together might turn up in some future campaign where they were running against one another for the White House, Pritzker said that wasn’t going to happen: “If we were running for something, we’d be running together.” Pritzker said.

It was another possible combination for 2028 or 2032 ticket for Democrats to consider. But the two governors were done fielding this week’s hypothetical questions about their futures. There would be plenty of time to figure that out later.

The past decade has been a remarkable demonstration of the extent to which celebrity and money can provide a platform for unfounded, dangerous theories about the world. These have always been with us, of course, but the advent of the internet or social media or both has allowed those theories to find pockets of support that snowball into movements when given just a little bit of push from fortune or fame.

On Friday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — scion of the most famous name in American politics — withdrew his independent bid for the presidency and offered his support (and presumably votes) to Donald Trump. While doing so, having attracted a substantial number of cameras and reporters for one of only a handful of times during his campaign, he rained bizarre claims and false assertions down upon them, reinforcing indirectly the extent to which even the limited success of his campaign was rooted in his last name rather than his commitment to reality.

We will leave the fact-checking to the fact-checkers, in part because this generally thankless task has rarely been more so. In part, too, because a lot of what Kennedy said has been debunked before, including by this newspaper. There is one slight misrepresentation that’s already sneaked into this story, though, that should be addressed: Kennedy sort of withdrew and sort of endorsed Trump, but also told blue-state voters to vote for him and maybe he had some path to the presidency? It didn’t make sense, but that, at least, was in keeping with the rest of the speech.

There was one point Kennedy made, however, that deserves elevation. It was that he was willing to (sort of) offer his support to Trump because he believed that Trump was committed to Kennedy’s pet causes and that the Republican would, if elected, uphold his commitments to work with Kennedy to address them.

“President Trump has told me that he wants this” — fixing “chronic disease” primarily by getting kids to eat better, apparently — “to be his legacy,” Kennedy said. “I’m choosing to believe at this time he will follow through.”

There’s some self-awareness there, certainly; someone with full confidence in the reliability of someone else doesn’t couch that confidence with a tacit “we’ll see.” But even that limited awarding of trust in Donald Trump seems very obviously to be misplaced.

First of all, there’s the fact that Donald Trump has never once mentioned “chronic disease” in this context. To believe that Trump is concerned about the issue is one thing. To take at anything close to face value that Trump intends for “chronic disease” to be the defining characteristic of Trump’s time in the White House requires an unbelievable level of credulousness.

Granted, this is Robert Kennedy, whose embrace of other false claims suggests a general willingness to overlook the available evidence in favor of what he wants to see. But this is overlooking a U.S.-Mexico-border-height wall to view an entirely different Donald Trump.

Second, there’s little reason to grant Trump a generous presumption of reliability in general. Last month, video leaked showing Kennedy accepting a call from Trump. Kennedy is shown with Trump on speakerphone, allowing viewers to hear both sides of the conversation. It’s clear that Trump is angling for the outcome (mostly) manifested Friday, doing so by telling Kennedy very obviously what he wants Kennedy to hear. Reporters who have spoken with Trump on the phone (like myself) will be familiar with this iteration of Trump, alternately wheedling and cajoling.

Kennedy seems to have been convinced.

The sort-of-former-candidate claimed that he was backing Trump because of “free speech, the war in Ukraine and the war on our children.” Kennedy spent some time on that second point, rehashing a remarkably Russia-sympathetic view of the conflict, before offering another example of his faith in the former president’s forthrightness.

“President Trump says that he will reopen negotiations with President Putin and end the war overnight as soon as he becomes president,” Kennedy told reporters. “This alone would justify my support for his campaign.”

There’s not really much to say to that. If you think that Trump will actually be able to “end the war overnight” simply through sheer force of will, even accepting that this outcome would mean capitulation to Russia, you’re giving Donald Trump an awful lot of unearned credit. The pattern of Trump’s politics from the outset has been to making sweeping promises, particularly when he’s not in a position to act upon them. Should those promises (almost invariably) fall short, they are redefined and reshaped until Trump can claim victory. It doesn’t take much observation of the world to understand how this has worked but, again, Kennedy’s public profile is not that of someone who adjusts his position in the face of countervailing evidence.

There’s an existing question of the extent to which Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump actually helps the former president. Just on paper, it’s likely that it won’t do much; he was polling in the low single digits, and third-party voters are often people only loosely committed to casting a ballot in the first place.

But there’s another angle here worth considering. Donald Trump is now, to at least some extent, accountable for what Kennedy says and does. Voters who like Trump but are wary of a senior administration official who has a background of opposing vaccines might also be less eager to vote.

One more problem: If Kennedy starts to, say, haul roadkill around New York state, Trump will be asked to weigh in on his most prominent supporter’s actions. There may come moments in which Trump will be tempted to disavow Kennedy, as he has his allies who worked on Project 2025. Will he refrain from doing so? And if he doesn’t, will Kennedy realize that — as he seems to suspect could happen and as many might predict will happen — he’s been played?

PHOENIX — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who struggled to gain traction as a third-party insurgent, said he would suspend his long-shot White House bid Friday, withdraw from battleground states’ ballots and endorse Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Kennedy announced that he would suspend his campaign with several caveats, after several turbulent months of declining polling numbers, accumulating debt and reemerging controversies from his past. He said he would no longer campaign in critical states and withdraw his name from the ballot, but he would remain as an option for blue and red states to ensure he doesn’t spoil the election. Kennedy blamed the two-party system and unfair media coverage when explaining his decision to a room of reporters and hardcore supporters gathered Friday.

“In an honest system, I believe I would have won the election,” he said. “In my heart, I no longer believe that I have a realistic path for electoral victory in the face of this relentless, systematic censorship and media control.”

Kennedy, who appeared to wipe away tears, gave an emotional speech. He said he expected his name to be on the ballot in “most” states, but he said polling “showed that by standing on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats with whom I disagree on the most existential issues — censorship, war and chronic disease.”

His partial departure concludes what had initially appeared to be one of the most promising third-party presidential bids in modern history that had drawn disaffected voters to the scion of one of America’s most beloved Democratic families. But the bizarre, quixotic campaign was attacked by both major political parties, which feared that Kennedy could pull from their bases. It faced other major challenges and hiccups, as well.

Kennedy’s decision comes after days of speculation that he would step aside. In the past several weeks, Kennedy spoke with Trump about potentially supporting him and sought a conversation with Vice President Kamala Harris about a role in her possible future administration, a move the Democratic campaign rebuffed. Days ago, his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, publicly floated the idea of his departure from the race. And Trump, who once called him “the most radical left candidate,” has praised him in recent days.

“We just had a very nice endorsement from RFK,” Trump said at a campaign event Friday in Las Vegas. “We’re going to be talking about that … great guy, respected by everybody.”

Kennedy — the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of former attorney general and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy — worked as an environmental lawyer but captured the attention of voters with his anti-vaccine crusade. Members of his famous, extended family forcefully opposed his candidacy, while the Democratic establishment sought to keep him off the ballot in multiple states, challenging his claim of New York residency as well as voter signatures.

Kennedy, 70, cast himself as an alternative to Trump, 78, and President Joe Biden, 81, as many voters expressed dismay with the prospect of a rerun of the 2020 race. The race shifted dramatically with Biden’s July 21 decision to abandon his reelection bid, and Vice President Kamala Harris unifying the party around her nomination.

While Kennedy had appeared to pull voters from both Biden and Trump earlier in the year, garnering at one point an average of about 15 percent of the vote, his support diminished in the late summer, hovering around 5 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average. After Biden stepped aside and endorsed Harris, polling began to show that Harris performed better when Kennedy and other third-party candidates were included. Shanahan indicated in a recent interview that the campaign did not want to contribute to a Harris win and take voters from Trump.

Democrats, however, calculated that Kennedy’s departure would have little impact on the race. Ramsey Reid, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee who has been helping to lead the charge against Kennedy, said in a memo Friday morning that Kennedy’s remaining support in public polls is small and roughly divided between likely Harris and likely Trump voters, if he leaves the race.

“Once around 15 percent, RFK Jr.’s support has been in free fall — now under 5 percent — and he’s not positioned to deliver any electoral benefit to Trump,” Reid wrote in the memo.

Kennedy’s campaign withdrew its petition for ballot access in Arizona, and an attorney for the campaign filed a notice in Pennsylvania that Kennedy would withdraw there. However, in Michigan, election officials said that minor parties can no longer withdraw candidates. Election officials in other states — including Nevada, North Carolina, Utah and Colorado — said they have not received a request from the campaign or his political party to take his name off the ballot.

“My name will remain on the ballot in most states,” Kennedy said. “If you live in a blue state, you can vote for me without harming or helping President Trump or Vice President Harris. In red states, the same will apply.”

Kennedy had spoken with Trump about endorsing his campaign and taking a job in a second Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of health and medical issues, The Washington Post previously reported.

Kennedy, who gained national attention during the coronavirus pandemic for his vocal criticism of vaccines and public health measures, attracted a devout following through his media appearances among young people skeptical of the establishment. Many of his early supporters were double haters — people who did not want to vote for Trump or Biden — and Kennedy seized on the unpopularity of the two major party candidates, attacking them both.

“If we elect the current candidates, we’re going to get more of the same,” he said in campaigning. “We’re going to get more debt. These two administrations ran up $8 trillion each. And we’re going to get more wars. We’re going to get more division, more anger, more hatred, more polarization.”

But Kennedy focused more of his attacks on Democrats. He suggested that Biden was a greater threat to democracy than Trump, and he increasingly took more right-leaning positions on issues. He said he was open to pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, and he reversed his position on abortion, saying it “should be legal up until a certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter” after confusion about his beliefs. He was also frequently attacked by Democrats for having the support of Republican megadonor Timothy Mellon.

More than a dozen of his family members — including siblings — endorsed Biden in April this year.

Kennedy, who had spent decades suing corporate polluters, also faced backlash from the environmental community, including former colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who put out full-page ads against him.

He also faced several controversies during his campaign, including stories resurfacing from his past, such as the time he had discarded a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, and that he was accused by his children’s nanny of sexual assault. The revelation that he had discovered in 2010 that a worm that entered his brain and then died attracted significant attention.

And he apologized last month when his son posted a video on social media of his father speaking on the phone with Trump during the Republican National Convention. He said he was “mortified” of the leaked video after Trump was heard agreeing with Kennedy’s discredited sentiments about vaccines and telling Kennedy that “we’re going to win.”

“Yeah,” Kennedy replied.

Kennedy had first announced his candidacy as a Democrat during the primary in April last year, but he said that he was leaving the party in October for an independent bid.

Kennedy faced major legal hurdles to get on states’ ballots, spending millions of dollars to challenge rules that varied state by state. Toward the end of his campaign, Kennedy had largely avoided public, in-person events, with his last one in Freeport, Maine, on July 9. He continued to employ a strategy of appearing on podcasts and online events.

Recognizing that the audience for Vice President Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech would probably draw in a broader, less heavily Democratic audience, the lineup of speakers at the Democratic convention Thursday evening included a number of validators from outside the party.

Among them was former Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger. He was speaking not because he’s a Democrat — he isn’t — but because his tenure in the House brought him into conflict with then-President Donald Trump. Kinzinger, like other speakers and like many Americans, was not pro-Harris, as such, but anti-Trump.

This is a tough sell for Republican voters who’ve spent nine years immersed in Trump’s framing of his critics as immoral or idiotic (regardless of party). The former president has repeatedly mocked Kinzinger, one of only a few elected Republicans who tried to hold Trump to account for his effort to retain power after the 2020 election. Kinzinger, in Trump’s estimation, is a disloyal, unethical actor — someone motivated, he seems to suggest, purely out of malice to Trump.

It’s never really clear how Trump’s supporters are supposed to reconcile this idea. Why would Kinzinger just suddenly turn on Trump? What’s the value for him? Getting a contributor gig with CNN? Generally, it’s safe to assume, there isn’t much thought given to it at all. Kinzinger just got slotted into the anti-Trump camp and that was that.

Kinzinger’s response is simple: He criticized Trump because Trump attempted to subvert an election and, with it, the American democratic system. This isn’t compelling to Republicans who support Trump, in part because they think criticisms of the former president, including on the aftermath of 2020, are offered in bad faith. So, given the opportunity to address the nation Thursday night, Kinzinger insisted that those in his party acknowledge a simple, obvious point.

“I’ve learned something about the Democratic Party, and I want to let my fellow Republicans in on the secret: The Democrats are as patriotic as us,” Kinzinger said after acknowledging that he’d never expected to speak at a Democratic convention. “They love this country just as much as we do. And they are as eager to defend American values at home and abroad as we conservatives have ever been.”

There’s been a lot of commentary about the extent to which the Democratic convention embraced patriotic messages and imagery. But Kinzinger’s speech distilled the point: Democrats are seen as unpatriotic by Republicans, if not worse.

In June, YouGov released polling evaluating how Americans viewed each of the two major political parties. Respondents were given a list of traits and asked if the terms applied to the parties. Among the terms were “patriotic” and “anti-American.”

One in 5 Americans said they thought the Democratic Party was patriotic, compared with a third who said the same of the Republican Party. Independents were twice as likely to describe the Republican Party as “patriotic” as they were to say the same of the Democratic Party. Democrats were less likely to describe their own party as “patriotic” than Republicans were theirs.

The patterns on “anti-American” were inverted. A majority of Republicans said that this described the Democratic Party — compared with 2 percent of Republicans who said that the Democratic Party was patriotic.

This is the perception that Kinzinger was hoping to combat. But part of it, clearly, is that Republicans have a different perception of what constitutes patriotism.

Gallup has regularly asked Americans how proud they are to be American. Over time, the percentage of respondents saying they’re “extremely” or “very” proud to be American has declined. Since the beginning of Trump’s presidency, the percentage of Americans saying they’re extremely proud to be American dropped from about 50 percent to about 40 percent.

That’s in part because of a decline in the percentage of Democrats describing themselves as extremely proud to be American. But the percentage among Republicans slipped, too.

What’s noteworthy when looking at the responses to this question is how much of an outlier Republicans are. Independents and Democrats are about equally likely to say they’re extremely proud to be American, after a big dip among Democrats when Trump took office. Republicans, though, are consistently far more likely than Americans overall to express that opinion.

We understand this intuitively, that Republican perceptions of patriotism don’t comport with Democratic perceptions. Democrats make room for criticism of the country with an eye toward improvement or addressing problems. Republicans are more likely to focus on America’s international primacy — except, as is often the case with Trump, when amplifying America’s perceived shortcomings is a useful political argument.

Kinzinger’s fight was an uphill one. But it’s easy to see the intent. If he could get Republicans to admit that Democrats are motivated by patriotism and by love of county, he could erode the idea that their criticisms of Trump’s 2020 response were merely partisan. And if Republicans reconsider Trump’s actions that led to the Capitol riot? Well, maybe they’d reconsider voting to return Trump to power.

As with so many other aspects of the 2024 election, the positive effect of this argument for Harris is likely to be subtle.

CHICAGO — Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is releasing a new television ad in battleground states with a message aimed at the middle class, in its first major move after the convention.

In the ad, titled “Opportunity,” Harris speaks directly to the camera about the importance of lowering costs and taxes on middle-class Americans. It’s a topic voters often list among their top concerns, one that President Joe Biden had struggled to gain credit for even though various economic indicators have improved during his time in office.

“Here’s a few things I believe. Middle-class families, like the one I grew up in, they want common sense solutions,” Harris says, as the ad shows a photo of her and her sister as young children standing with their mother. “You want lower prices and lower taxes, I believe you want to not just get by, but you want to get ahead.”

The new ad, part of an eight-figure buy, will soon begin airing in seven battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada — as well as in Nebraska, a state which splits its electoral college votes.

The ad also shows her in a diner and in several small businesses. It never mentions her Republican rival, Donald Trump, but several times shows her with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

“We must create an opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to get a car loan, buy a home, start a business,” Harris says. “But most of all, that instead of being focused on the politics of the past, we need to be thinking about the future.”

The ad comes a week after Harris rolled out a populist economic agenda during a speech in North Carolina, providing a more detailed vision of her governing priorities, including eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans, banning what she termed “price gouging” for groceries and food, capping prescription drug costs and providing a $25,000 credit for first-time home buyers.

Charles Lutvak, a spokesman for the Harris-Walz campaign, said that improving conditions for the middle class “will be a central goal of her administration” and will be a “a stark contrast to Donald Trump, who will only help the ultrarich and corporations while raising costs for middle class families.”

Following her convention speech Thursday night, Harris is planning to depart Chicago Friday afternoon and return to Washington. She isn’t expected to have any events this weekend, but campaign aides say that she is planning to hit the campaign trail again next week.

CHICAGO — The marchers had moved on, the chants had faded away, and the protest had ended. But Julie Wroblewski’s job is just beginning.

She walked carefully through a public park in this Midwest metropolis, combing over the flotsam left behind by the thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators who had crowded in hours earlier to denounce the nearby Democratic National Convention.

She picked up placards and grabbed pamphlets, preserving history as it happened. During a hectic and momentous week here, her mission was vital but easily overlooked.

Wroblewski’s business card says she’s the director of collections for the Chicago History Museum. In layperson’s terms, she’s an archaeologist of the present. If journalists write the first rough draft of history, Wroblewski is gathering material for the more polished version.

In a city with a more explosive political convention history than anywhere else, museum professionals like Wroblewski have been hard at work this week, ensuring that a record of what unfolds inside and outside the United Center is documented for posterity.

With the memory of the infamous 1968 convention hanging over the proceedings, Wroblewski and others have been considering what from the current moment could be important to museum visitors in the decades to come. As society’s shared history becomes increasingly digital, living mostly on unstable and ephemeral formats, old-fashioned preservation work is even more important, she said.

And while Wroblewski’s profession might conjure images of quiet days spent amid dusty stacks of crumbling documents, it’s intensely physical work. History happens outside, and the best way to record it is to see it up close.

“If we just spent all our time sitting in the archives or behind the desk,” she said, “we’d end up with nothing in the museum, and history would have an end date.”

Wroblewski, 48, likes to call her job “Chicago History Museum CrossFit,” and she’s no stranger to 20,000-step days. That’s especially true on weeks like this. The museum specializes in documenting social protest movements, so when big demonstrations erupt in the city, staff fan out to observe and collect.

Earlier this week, Wroblewski arrived in Union Park, about a half-mile from the secured convention zone, as protesters wrapped up their rally and began a march. A police helicopter still thwapped overhead. She wore sturdy sandals, a dress and a hat with the word “Books” stamped on it as she surveyed the detritus left behind.

She was looking for artifacts that, in museum parlance, offered both “evidentiary and informational value.” Basically, does a given piece say something new about what happened at the event, who attended or the broader context in which it happened?

But before she began, she offered a disclaimer: The items she collects, she said, are not meant to reflect a certain viewpoint — neither hers nor the museum’s. Instead, she’s looking to get a wide, representative range of perspectives.

The first sign she pondered was glossy and official looking, stamped with the logo of the coalition that organized the demonstration. Along with “End U.S. Aid to Israel,” the sign called for “Community control of the police now!” Wroblewski considered it. The combination showed how many different causes were animating protesters, she explained, and she picked it up.

The museum, a nonprofit founded in the 1850s, has a multistep process to decide what it will ultimately store in its collection. Because space is extremely limited, the choice is weighty.

The next placard Wroblewski chose showed President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken with their eyes glowing like lasers, an homage to the “Dark Brandon” meme popularized in recent years. The accompanying text accused the leaders of enabling the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

“This is very of its time,” she said.

But Wroblewski wasn’t just looking to acquire things. She wanted to make connections, too. She introduced herself to protesters and organizers, handed out her contact info and encouraged people to get in touch in the future if they’d like to donate anything. The museum sees itself as a community resource, she said, and staffers want to distinguish it from institutions that have employed unethical or exploitative collection practices.

One item she hopes will be donated: a handcrafted sign she’d seen, shaped like a tank featuring the words “Welcome to Chicago,” evoking a placard with the same phrase seen in the ’68 protests.

The work can sometimes be maddening, especially when it feels like history is at risk of slipping away, either cast off by protesters or picked up by trash collectors.

“There’s probably a thousand things and a thousand stories or more that will end up in the trash because there’s only so much you can collect,” Wroblewski said. “You have to know that you’re not getting everything, but you keep trying to do as much as you can.”

By the end of the week, her haul included five signs, three fliers highlighting the suffering in Gaza, a leftist magazine, a spoofed copy of the New York Times that accused world leaders of war crimes, and three dozen reference photographs of stickers, graffiti and other items too cumbersome to collect on the spot.

Wroblewski and her colleagues aren’t yet sure how they will display the material they gather from this week, but they hope to feature it as an exhibit, conduct an oral history project and make as much available for future researchers as possible.

Until then, it will live in the storage rooms of the Chicago History Museum, a stately building of brick and glass that sits near the shore of Lake Michigan.

On the museum’s second floor, a newly opened exhibit called “Designing for Change” showcases protest art from 1960s and ’70s social movements in the city, including around the bloody Democratic National Convention in 1968.

“Museums are the places that maintain our public record,” said Charles Bethea, its director of curatorial affairs. “When we’re living through events, people have a different lens. Only time allows you to step back and analyze it from every angle.”

At a moment when debates about history — how it’s told and from whose perspective — are fracturing so many parts of civic life, institutions like museums are especially vital, Bethea said.

“It’s almost as if there are only a handful of professions that are the last bastions of truth,” he said.

Down the hall from the “Designing for Change” exhibit is the museum’s permanent 1968 installation, an arresting wall featuring pins worn by protesters, a battered Chicago police helmet and a looping video recapping the violence in and around the convention. While protests this week remained largely peaceful and never approached the mayhem of 1968, the parallels were still striking.

On Wednesday afternoon, a couple of Democratic delegates from New Jersey wandered into the exhibit and stood in front of it, transfixed.

“I was born in 1967, one year before this happened,” said Della McCall, from the city of Paterson. “And here I am, 56 years later.”

She was in town to nominate a barrier-breaking candidate, and even though it’s far too soon to know how this week will be viewed in another half-century, one thing is certain, McCall said.

“We’re witnessing history,” she added, “right up close and personal.”

The promise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent 2024 campaign was always something of a mirage. His famous last name combined with the unpopularity of President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump allowed Kennedy, for a time, to poll better than any third-party candidate had since Ross Perot in the 1990s — near 20 percent.

But his steady decline since then makes it clear that this was never about firm support of Kennedy the candidate.

And Friday, Kennedy’s campaign effectively concluded with another mirage — one that epitomizes how unserious a candidate he proved to be.

Kennedy announced that he is suspending his campaign, as expected, and endorsing Trump, as expected. There is reason to believe this could help Trump on the margins. That’s because Kennedy’s few supporters (he’s down to about 5 percent in the polling averages) tend to lean more toward Trump and the GOP.

But Kennedy didn’t stop there. He insisted he is suspending but not ending his campaign. And he even fantasized about a scenario in which he could still become president.

It is not a realistic proposal.

Kennedy signaled that he would seek to withdraw from the ballots only in the swing states, while remaining on the ballots in firmly blue and red states. The idea is that he could still amass votes without being a spoiler in the states that matter.

Why would those votes be important? Because he argued he could still be elected if Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris split the electoral college vote and there was no outright winner.

“If you do vote for me, and neither of the candidates win 270 electoral votes, which is quite possible — in fact, today our polling shows them tying at 269-269 — I could conceivably still end up in the White House in a contingent election,” Kennedy said.

What Kennedy is describing is indeed theoretically possible, but I can’t emphasize “theoretically” enough.

The Constitution says that if no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, the winner is decided by the House, with each state’s delegation casting one vote. (There’s a great primer on all this here.)

The current makeup of the electoral votes in each state means there are some legitimate scenarios in which each candidate ends up with 269. It’s why Trump has pushed for Nebraska to stop awarding electoral votes by congressional district — in hopes of winning a single electoral vote in a blue-leaning Omaha-based district.

For Kennedy’s idea to work, the electoral college would deadlock and the House would somehow skip over the top two finishers for him, perhaps because the state’s delegations also deadlocked over which one they preferred.

But even aside from the far-fetched idea that the House would skip over those two candidates for Kennedy — someone Democrats in particular have no love for — there’s the small matter of how it doesn’t appear that Kennedy would even be eligible in that scenario.

The 12th Amendment states that, in a contingent election, the states would choose “from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President.” In other words, from the top three candidates.

But professor Derek Muller of Notre Dame Law School noted that the third-place finisher must actually win an electoral vote — not just finish in third place in the popular vote.

“If there is a 269-269 tie, only Trump and Harris could be considered under the 12th Amendment,” Muller said. “In order for Kennedy to be considered, he’d need to win at least one electoral vote.”

What this means in practice? It wouldn’t actually be a tie. Kennedy would have to snag an electoral vote somehow. His depressed poll numbers suggest he’s not close to winning a state or a congressional district in one of the two states that divvy up electoral votes by district (Nebraska and Maine).

So he’d basically have to rely upon a “faithless elector” to cast an electoral vote for him that was designated for someone else. But the vast majority of states have laws prohibiting faithless electors.

To recap: We somehow wind up with a tie. He somehow gets an electoral vote. And the House somehow goes for a guy who didn’t truly win a single electoral vote.

“Kennedy seems to be going beyond reality in his quixotic quest to matter,” said Paul Beck, an emeritus professor of political science at Ohio State University.

The final point here is just how discordant this bank-shot-upon-bank-shot theory is next to the other things Kennedy was saying. In announcing his endorsement of Trump, Kennedy pitched the Democratic Party as being anti-democratic, including by citing the fact that Harris has become her party’s nominee despite failing to win a single delegate when she ran in the 2020 primaries.

But here was Kennedy pitching a scenario in which he would somehow be elected president apparently without winning a single electoral vote — or even running a campaign.