Good morning to all the Olympics haters out there. The 2024 Games end on Sunday. The closing ceremony airs live on NBC at 2:00 p.m. ET. We’re proud of you for being brave these past few weeks. Constantly pretending to care about handball or somesuch isn’t easy. For the Olympics lovers out there, fear not. The 2024 Paris Paralympics kick off on August 28th. If you thought the past two weeks were impressive, just wait.

HISTORY

🏛️ A look back: Nixon’s resignation at 50

Back in the 1940s, some guys got together for a regular poker game. Yadda, yadda, yadda… Richard Nixon resigned the presidency 50 years ago today. So let’s roll the hits.

• Nixon was so good at poker that he partially funded his first campaign for Congress with his winnings.

A familiar résumé: Richard Nixon was chosen as the Republican vice presidential candidate at age 39 after having spent four years in the military, gone to law school, and served less than two years in the Senate.

• For those keeping track at home, that sentence remains 100% true if you sub in the name "JD Vance." Nixon, however, had also spent four years in the House repping Southern California.

Yikes: A comment from the boss, President Eisenhower, may be partly to blame for Nixon's loss in the 1960 presidential election to JFK (wildly, those two were about the same age)

• When asked about major decisions where he'd taken then-Vice President Nixon's advice, Eisenhower gave 'em this doozy: "If you give me a week, I might think of one."

Don't call it a comeback: Nixon's 1962 comeback bid for governor of California bombed hard. So he swore off politics, telling reporters that they wouldn't "have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."

• Six years later, he was elected president of the United States. (There's a killer LinkedIn post about resilience in there somewhere.)

Watergate: By the time his 1972 reelection rolled around, Nixon was popular... but he was also Richard Nixon. So he and CREEP (that is, the Committee to Re-Elect the President) broke into Democratic Party offices at the Watergate Office Building to give his campaign a boost. The plan backfired, of course, when Forrest Gump caught them in the act.

• Nixon's involvement wasn't revealed until much later. So he won reelection in a monster, 49-state landslide.

• Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew (yes, Spiro) resigned in 1973 for a scandal completely unrelated to Watergate. If you've ever goofed and missed out on something big...

Yadda, yadda, yadda, Watergate caught up to him and he was facing certain impeachment and removal from office. So, on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first and only president to resign the office.

UNITED STATES

💊 The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) must decide by Sunday whether to allow the use of MDMA (molly/ecstasy) in the treatment of PTSD. The FDA typically rolls with its advisory panel, which opposes approval. But it’s under heavy pressure from advocates, including veterans groups and 80 members of Congress.

👨‍⚖️ Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch raked in a $500,000 advance for his new book, “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law.” Justices have a $30,000 limit on outside income (aka teaching). But that doesn’t apply to book deals — a factor they’re often quick to take advantage of to the tune of millions.

🔫 A federal appeals court upheld Maryland’s 2013 ban on assault weapons, dealing a blow to Second Amendment rights groups. The state’s ban includes dozens of popular firearms, including the AR-15 and caps magazines at 10 rounds. The Supreme Court previously declined to hear this case.

POLITICS

⚪ 🗯️ Debate: The debate debate is over at last (mostly). Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will duke it out live on stage on September 10 on ABC. Trump's camp says he's also agreed to a September 4 debate on Fox News and another on NBC on September 25. But Harris isn't so sure about those other two, saying only that she's "happy to have that conversation" later.

⚪ 📊 Polls: A fresh, new round of dueling polls just dropped. A Marist survey has Harris leading nationwide by 3% while a competing CNBC poll has Trump up by 2%. That doesn’t tell us much. But these polls do agree on one thing: voters like Trump on the economy.

🔵 Harris: The VP slapped down some hecklers at a rally in Detroit with her 2020 debate hit, "I'm speaking" and accused them of supporting Trump. The pro-Palestinian protestors wanted her to support an arms embargo against Israel. After some confusion, her campaign confirmed that she does not.

• The new Democratic ticket is wrapping up a five-day, seven-state campaign blitz. Harris and Walz are hitting the seven most critical swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump won six of them in 2016 but lost six to Biden in 2020.

🔴Trump: Donald Trump was in rare form yesterday, holding an hourlong press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He said the Harris/Biden switch didn’t affect his strategy “at all” and believes Harris is “worse than Biden.” Trump doesn’t believe Harris’s current “honeymoon period” will last and isn’t worried about the huge crowds at her rallies. On Biden, he gave us the ole standard: “I’m not a big fan of his brain.”

• JD Vance made an unsuccessful show of walking down the tarmac trying to speak with Kamala Harris after their planes landed minutes apart at the tiny airport in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

🔵 Bidens: The president and first lady met with hundreds of Biden (now Harris) campaign staffers in Delaware yesterday to thank them for their hard work over the past year. No word yet on whether the genius who convinced him to debate was invited to the party.

🏛️ Senate: The battle to control the Senate runs through Arizona and Republican nominee Kari Lake has an unconventional strategy: Don’t tack to the center. Double down on MAGA. It’s a bold move for a candidate who’s never led a poll she didn't pay for.

• On the other side, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) knows his party’s luck is running out in Ohio. His strategy to win a tough race amounts to “Kamala who?” Brown is ignoring Harris, won’t defend Biden, and plans to skip the Democratic convention.

TRIVIA

With his full involvement in the Watergate break-in still undiscovered, Richard Nixon cruised to a 49-state landslide reelection in 1972 (to compare, Barack Obama only took 28 states in his huge 2008 win). What is the only state that did not vote for Richard Nixon in 1972?

Hint: It was the home state of a former opponent.

WORLD

🇦🇹 Austria: A 19-year-old Austrian confessed to planning an attack on Taylor Swift’s now-canceled three-concert series in Vienna. Officials believe he self-radicalized online and pledged loyalty to the Islamic terror group ISIS. Austria's Chancellor apologized for the "shattered" dreams of 170,000 European Swifties.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria: If you ever get sick of elections, be glad you’re not Bulgarian — they’re facing their seventh election in three years. With seven major political parties, cobbling together the required majority coalition in Parliament ain’t easy. And making it last? Even harder.

🇺🇦 Ukraine: As the stalemate drags on and Russia digs its heels into Eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainians are in desperate need of a new strategy. And it looks like they found it: Slap down that Uno Reverse card and invade Russia back. The race is on now to prevent Ukraine from solidifying its hold on the ~135 square miles of Russia its surprise attack captured this week.

BRIEFS

• Some idiot in Spain destroyed 6,000-year-old cave paintings after pouring water on them so they’d really sparkle for social media

• The vibe killers at JPMorgan (the world’s biggest non-state-owned bank) raised their estimate for a recession this year to 35%

• Amazon is getting its butt kicked in India by “quick commerce” startups that promise local delivery in as little as 10 minutes

• Scientists might have found a way to dramatically reduce the cost of producing computer chips (current machines cost $380 million)

• A man awaiting trial for storming the capitol on January 6th is now in jail for threatening Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett

• Apps are out, defense is in — Anduril Industries just raised $1.5 billion in venture capital to challenge the ossifying defense industry

QUOTE

SNACKS

🚁 Future: Archer Aviation announced plans for an air taxi network in Los Angeles in time for the 2026 World Cup. First, it was Rosie. Now it's the flying cars. If somebody starts building houses on poles, we'll have gone full Jetsons.

💪 Good News: We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news? Gen Z is swole. They love going to the gym. So what’s the bad news? Many gyms survive on their members not going every day. The result? Discount chains like Planet Fitness jacking up prices for the first time in 30 years.

👴 SNL: Sorry to burst your bubble, but Steve Martin put the kibosh on the idea of him playing Tim Walz. Producer Lorne Michaels offered him the role, but our man Steve is too honest. "They need a real impressionist to do that," he said. "They’re gonna find somebody really, really good. I’d be struggling.”

ANSWER

Maybe it was a leftover 1960 grudge, maybe it was something else. But JFK’s home state of Massachusetts stood in the way of a clean, 50-state sweep for Tricky Dick in 1972.

For some 2024 relevance, this was the last year that Tim Walz’s home state of Minnesota went Republican. It later filled in for Massachusetts as the only state to stand in the way of a 50-state sweep for Ronald Reagan in 1984.