Last week, we wrote our third Friday Talking Points column in a row that dispensed with our usual format and was solely devoted to angst and calling on President Joe Biden to drop out of the race. This week, we are happy to say, things have changed for the better. And that's putting it mildly!

Vice President Kamala Harris is now the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee. Joe Biden is now officially (through his own decision) a lame duck. And Democrats by the millions have been astounded that they are now feeling genuine hope and actual enthusiasm about an election that was shaping up to be pretty grim indeed.

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What a week it has been....

Last Thursday night, America watched Donald Trump accept his party's presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention. Republicans had owned the news cycle all week long as they put on their quadrennial extravaganza, topped off with a full hour and a half of Trump rambling on about this, that, and the other. Traditionally, presidential candidates get a "convention bump" from all the free media, so perhaps Team Trump was looking forward to skating for the upcoming week, and just riding out the wave that the convention brought.

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That headline is not technically accurate, since President Joe Biden will doubtlessly deliver some sort of farewell address at the end of his term next January. But history will mark tonight as the one that counted -- the one where Biden informed the American public that he will no longer seek a second term in office and will thus be a lame-duck president for the next six months. Which, again, is not even strictly accurate, since Biden made his initial bombshell announcement last Sunday. But he was sidelined with a case of COVID-19 and wanted to wait until his voice had recovered, so tonight was chosen for Biden's true swansong speech.

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The political message of this week was that Republicans are unified behind their presidential nominee Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Democrats are increasingly fractured, unsure of who they even want at the top of their ticket.

The Democratic dam didn't exactly break today, but it is getting a whole lot weaker as time goes by. A third sitting Democratic senator called for President Joe Biden to step aside and make way for someone else to run, in addition to nine more Democratic House members -- the largest one-day total yet. To date, a full 35 congressional Democrats have now done so. Biden is currently quarantining at his home in Delaware (suffering from his third case of COVID-19), and so far shows no signs of heeding the call to turn the reins of the campaign over to anyone else.

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So the Republican National Convention got underway yesterday, capped by a cameo appearance by Donald Trump, with bandaged ear. The biggest news from the convention was the announcement that Senator J.D. Vance would be Trump's running mate, but Trump's surprise appearance was definitely the most memorable moment of the night. The other big surprise last night was hearing from a Union boss (Teamsters), which is not exactly a usual thing at a Republican convention (to put it mildly). Is Trump (and now Vance) truly shifting the Republican Party to a more populist outlook, or was it more of a "let's make the Democrats scared" type of stunt? It's impossible to say, really. The Union boss did get the key speaking slot (he was the last big speech of the night) and was allowed to speak for at least 15 minutes (which is a long speech for a convention). The applause was pretty tepid, though, as plenty of GOP delegates are not exactly friendly to Unions in general.

But instead of a play-by-play of yesterday's convention I am going to write primarily about Democrats today. Because there was big news from the other side of the aisle as well.

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Well, that was another week mostly wasted.

This isn't just our opinion, either. Here is what Biden campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon had to say in an all-staff call yesterday:

We had two very, very, very hard weeks, very bad weeks. I told you I'd level with you; they've been bad fucking weeks. This two-week window has really sucked, and it is hard, there is no doubt about it.

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Maybe it's just us, but this week seemed like a waiting game. Perhaps the midweek holiday had something to do with it, but everything in the political world right now seems to be on hold in anticipation of next Thursday's first presidential debate. The debate is going to be incredibly early in the campaign schedule, but nobody really knows what this will mean until after the dust settles. Who will benefit the most from the earliness of it all? Well, that all depends on how they do, of course.

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President Joe Biden has had to walk a tightrope on the subject of immigration during his term in office. He has supported programs that were a holdover from the administration of Donald Trump, and just recently announced a tightening of the rules on claiming asylum at the border in an effort to slow the flow of people making such claims. Neither one of these policies went over very well with the progressives in his own party, but this week Biden shifted gears and announced a policy that will benefit the lives of approximately 500,000 people. Undocumented spouses of America citizens who have lived in the country for 10 years or more will have a much easier path to citizenship under Biden's new program. Politically, this may provide a balance to Biden's more restrictive moves on immigration.

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The biggest political news of the week by far was Hunter Biden being convicted in record time on all three felony gun charges lodged against him. The jury spent only about three hours before returning these verdicts, which completely undercut the narrative Donald Trump has been spouting about how the justice system is "two-tiered" -- by which he means: "weaponized against Republicans while Democrats get a free pass." Kind of hard to make that argument when the president's own son just got convicted of felonies and is facing up to ten years in prison.

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Two weeks from tomorrow, CNN will host the first general election presidential debate of the 2024 cycle. This is unprecedented, because it will happen so early in the campaign season. In fact, neither person on stage will officially be their party's nominee at this point, since the conventions will happen afterwards. It will be "Presumptive Republican Nominee Donald Trump" versus "Presumptive Democratic Nominee President Joe Biden." That alone sets it off from every other televised presidential debate.

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