You can’t blame Mike Pence for wanting to keep his head down in this presidential election, given that he nearly had his head in a noose after the last one.

“I’m staying out of this race,” Pence said plaintively—more plaintively even than usual—in a rare interview with Lyndsay Keith on something called Merit Street Media (founded, apparently, by Dr. Phil). Pence sat stiffly, and his voice was hushed and dramatic, as it typically is. He was repeating what he has said before: that he could not support Donald Trump after everything the former president had done, and that he could never back Kamala Harris, either, because of what he holds sacred—namely “the sanctity of life,” which is the “calling of our time.”

“I’ve made it clear I won’t be endorsing,” he reiterated. “How I vote, I will keep to myself.”

But it’s not so simple for Pence. He can try to opt out, but his ordeal inevitably makes him an inescapable figure in this cliff-hanger for American democracy.

At so many turns, his absence has spoken louder than his presence ever could. He is a reminder of Trump’s abject indecency, the former president’s pitiless trampling of norms and the consequence-free zone afforded him by the Republican Party and the Supreme Court.

[Read: How Jack Smith outsmarted the Supreme Court]

“Well, it’s a shame,” Trump said in a recent interview, in an answer to a question about Pence. He conveyed not a speck of regret about Pence, only grievance, as he does. Trump started talking about January 6, 2021, that most fateful day of choosing for his most slavishly devoted of deputies. No one did complete submission to Trump like Pence did—right up until he chose fealty to the Constitution over the wishes of “my president,” as Pence used to refer to Trump (also: “this extraordinary man,” paragon of “broad-shouldered leadership”). “He couldn’t cross the line of doing what was right,” Trump lamented. He also allowed that Pence was a “good man.” They’d had a “very good relationship.” In the end, though, Pence lacked the “courage” and “stamina” to do Trump’s ultimate bidding—for which many thought he should pay the ultimate price.

“So what?” Trump was saying in the Oval Office while rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol. This latest detail was dropped into the delirium bowl by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent court filing in the January 6 case. In a rational world, this would be a bombshell—another example of Trump’s callous dereliction, his willingness to leave his deputy to a hanging mob of his own supporters.

But “so what?” pretty much summed up Americans’ response to this latest October non-surprise.

“So what” about Mike Pence? He can’t help but remain—the specter of him, if not the man himself. “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” Tim Walz said, taunting his counterpart, J. D. Vance, in their debate.

Democrats like to point out that even Trump’s own vice president won’t support him. Remarkable, right? It should be, yes—it should speak volumes about Trump. Except: So what? Republican voters keep speaking their own volumes about Trump and keep nominating him. They keep proving, if more proof was needed, that Trump is a special case.

From the start, it was a bit of a mystery with Pence: how this most ostentatiously virtuous of Christians could affix himself to one of the most vulgar creatures ever to soil our public stage. Sure, ambition, opportunism, a mansion and a big plane—great. But how did Pence even get past, say, the Access Hollywood tape in 2016? His approach was essentially to swallow everything—all of the cruelty, crassness, and chaos from Trump—in the belief that this presidency would be a boon to the far-right policies that Pence had spent decades yearning for. He went along to get what he needed and to keep the peace with the boss, until he no longer could.

“Pence is always going to occupy this complex, almost unfathomable place,” the presidential historian Ted Widmer of the City University of New York told me. A speechwriter in the Clinton White House, Widmer has written several books on American democracy, leaders, and campaigns. He says that by standing firm against Trump on January 6, Pence ensured himself a kind of historical purgatory. “Nobody was as true blue of a Republican or loyal vice president as Pence was,” Widmer said. “Everything could have turned out so perfectly for him.” His refusal to help Trump thwart the will of American voters “might buy Pence whatever the historian’s version of a mulligan is,” Widmer told me. “But it is also the same thing that was unforgivable in Trump’s moral universe.”

Pence rarely talks about the day that will always define him. If it comes up, he prefers to frame January 6 as “a disagreement” that he had with Trump over what authority a vice president had (or clearly did not have) to challenge the certification of Electoral College votes. In the end, he declared his allegiance to an even higher authority than Trump. “I’ve always said that the safest place in the world is to be at the center of God’s will,” Pence said.

He likes to remind people that he and Trump spoke several times in the final, post-insurrection days of their administration. “We parted amicably,” he said in the Merit Street Media interview, adding that Trump “told me in the Oval Office with many present that he thought I’d done a great job.” Also, Pence said, Trump thanked him on the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base. And they’d spoken often by phone in the days after he left office.

“But there was something in the early days of the spring of 2021 where he seemed to shift back,” Pence told Keith. Pence said he then concluded that, “like the Bible says, at some point, you’ve just got to wipe the dust off your feet and go your own separate ways.”

In so much as Pence is willing to discuss his breakup with Trump, he tends to focus on how the former president has abandoned the conservative positions that they championed in office. This particularly relates to abortion, but extends to a broader betrayal: “I’ve literally seen him walking away from strong American leadership on the world stage. I’ve seen him marginalize the right to life, and even parrot Democrats when it comes to the crisis facing our children and grandchildren in the National Debt,” Pence told Keith.

“When you now see Trump separating from Pence, it’s not just [Trump] going back to being pro-abortion,” Marc Short, Pence’s former vice-presidential chief of staff, who remains one of Pence’s closest advisers and confidants, told me. “It’s Trump moving away from the free-trader Mike Pence, who is also anti-tax and anti-tariff, and who would not abandon Ukraine.”

[Read: The Christian radicals are coming]

As for January 6, it has become something of a gateway drug. If Trump can be forgiven for that, what would his supporters not tolerate? Whether or not he ever gets convicted for it, Trump’s ability to overcome that day politically has come to represent its own get-out-of-jail-free card. What’s a little wobbliness on abortion?

“Once Republicans decide to condone Trump going the wrong way on the rule of law,” Short said, it becomes possible to rationalize all manner of ideological trespass. “I do think for a lot of people, once you’ve crossed that bridge, set aside your oath to the Constitution,” Short told me—“when you have violated what you know to be true—you figure that you might as well go all in.”

Friends of Pence say that many Republicans, including Trump supporters, will often express support for him. They tell him he is a good man, and they respect what he did, and that it’s unfair how he’s been treated. But these conversations almost always happen in private. They would never say as much in public—for fear, of course, of crossing Trump.

Where does that leave Pence, a Christian conservative in a GOP now governed by one man’s impulses? In powerful circles of the party, Pence remains a pariah. “Judas Pence is a dead man walking with MAGA,” Steve Bannon told The New York Times in June. If Trump wins, maybe he softens and absolves his former vice president, who did nearly everything he asked. If nothing else, Pence will endure as the cautionary scoundrel of the Trump age: one who was loyal to the bitter end, and barely lived to tell about it.

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent filing to the D.C. District Court in the Trump v. United States presidential-immunity case both fleshes out and sharpens the evidence of Donald Trump’s sprawling criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. To understand the filing’s larger significance as well as its limitations, we must first review a bit of recent history.

In its shocking decision on July 1 to grant the presidency at least presumed immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority showed once again that it was intent on immunizing one president in particular: Donald Trump. The Court majority’s decision, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, was explicit. It held, for example, that Trump’s alleged efforts to pressure then–Vice President Mike Pence into voiding the 2020 election results on January 6 constituted “official conduct” from which Trump “is at least presumptively immune from prosecution.” That presumed immunity, the Court contended, would disappear only if the prosecution could convince the courts that bringing the case to trial would pose no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”  

The Court thus remanded the case back to the D.C. District Court to decide the matter, along with the question of whether Trump is actually immune to the rest of the charges against him. How, though, could the prosecution of a president or former president over an “official act” fail to intrude on presidential authority? Seemingly, anything pertaining to Trump’s contacts with the vice president as he presided in his constitutional role as president of the Senate—as well as Trump’s contacts with the Department of Justice, which the Court also singled out and which the prosecution, significantly, felt compelled to omit from its revised indictment—deserves, as the Court sees it, virtually ironclad protection, a powerful blow against the entire January 6 indictment.    

Although the sweeping outcome of Trump v. United States took most legal commentators by surprise, its protection of Trump was completely predictable given the Court’s previous conduct regarding the January 6 insurrection. The refusal of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to recuse themselves from any matter related to the insurrection, despite their own conflicted positions—Thomas due to the direct involvement of his wife, Ginni Thomas, in the subversion; Alito because of his flag-waving support of Trump’s election denials—has received the most public attention concerning the Court majority’s partisan partiality. But another set of telltale signs becomes apparent after a closer tracking of the Court’s decision making.

Almost as soon as the case against Trump came before D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Supreme Court played along with the Trump lawyers’ efforts to delay the trial until after the November 2024 election. First, after Chutkan ruled against Trump’s absolute-immunity claims in December 2023, Special Counsel Smith asked the Supreme Court to expedite matters by hearing the case immediately, not waiting for the U.S. Court of Appeals to rule on Trump’s appeal of Chutkan’s decision. The Supreme Court refused. Two months later, though, when the appeals court ruled against Trump and set a new trial date, the Supreme Court dragged its feet for as long as possible before announcing that it would take up the case after all. It then set the date for oral arguments as late as possible, at the end of April. This meant that even before hearing the case, the Court made it highly unlikely that Trump’s trial would proceed in a timely manner, effectively immunizing Trump until after the election.

Although radical in its long-term reconstruction of the American presidency, the ruling more immediately affirmed and extended the Court’s protection of Trump from prosecution. By remanding the case to the D.C. Circuit Court to decide what in the indictment constitutes official (and, therefore, presumably immune) conduct, the justices guaranteed that no trial would occur until after Election Day. After that, meanwhile, should Trump win the election, no trial would occur at all, because he would certainly fire Smith and shut down the proceedings.

Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection. Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity. Outwardly, Smith’s filing respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts. Legally, Smith had no choice but to operate within that ruling, a fact that sharply limited how far his filing could go. But even though it never challenges the conservative majority directly, the filing makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever. It persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself.     

In remounting his case, Smith has taken the opportunity to release previously unknown details, some of which he says he doesn’t even plan to present at trial, that underscore the depravity as well as the extent of Trump’s criminal actions. Consider, for example, Smith’s telling of Trump’s reaction to the news from one of his staff, at the height of the violence on January 6, that his tweets attacking Pence had placed Pence’s life in extreme danger. “So what?” Trump reportedly replied. He had clearly intended for his tweets to reach the mob at the Capitol. His nonchalance about the vice president’s life epitomizes the lengths to which he would go to complete his coup d’état.

But the real force of Smith’s filing is in its tight presentation of the evidence of a criminal conspiracy in minute detail, dating back to the summer before the 2020 election, when Trump began publicly casting doubts on its legitimacy should he not be declared the winner. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” he told the Republican National Convention in his nomination-acceptance speech in August 2020.      

From that point forward, Trump was at the center of every effort to keep him in power, even once he was fully aware that he had no grounds to contest Joe Biden’s victory. There were his private operatives sowing chaos at polling places and vote-counting centers, the scheming to declare victory on Election Night before the results were in, the bogus legal challenges, the fake-elector fraud, the plot to deny official certification by Congress on January 6, and finally the insurrection itself. “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” one witness reports Trump saying. “You still have to fight like hell.”

The crucial point to which the filing unfailingly returns is that none of Trump’s actions listed in the revised indictment, even those that the Court cited as “official,” deserves immunity. As Smith makes clear, the Framers of the Constitution deliberately precluded the executive branch from having official involvement in the conduct of presidential elections. The reason was obvious: Any involvement by a president would be an open invitation to corruption. To make the case that any such involvement falls within a president’s official duties would seem, at best, extremely difficult.       

It is here that Smith turns the Court’s Trump v. United States ruling to his own advantage. Concerning specific charges that Trump’s speechmaking contributed to the insurrection, the Court allowed that “there may be contexts in which the President speaks in an unofficial capacity—perhaps as a candidate for office or party leader.” Quoting from an earlier Court decision, the ruling then states that determining these matters would require that the district court undertake “objective analysis of [the] ‘content, form, and context’” of the speeches in question, a “necessarily fact-bound analysis.” Likewise, regarding the allegations apart from Trump’s supposedly official communications and public speeches, the justices enjoined the district court, on remand, to “carefully analyze” those charges “to determine whether they too involve conduct for which the President may be immune from prosecution.”     

Citing those exact phrases as the Court’s standard of inquiry and proof, Smith then offers evidence that every count in the revised indictment concerns either technically official conduct undeserving of immunity or unofficial conduct involving Trump’s private actions as a candidate and not his official duties as president. These actions include his efforts to pressure state officials, preposterously presented by Trump’s defense attorneys as official inquiries into election integrity. They include his conversations about elector slates, about which the president has no official duties. They also encompass all of his speechmaking about the allegedly crooked election, up to and including his incitement at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, which was not an official function.

Above all, Smith nails down a matter that the Court’s opinion went out of its way to declare “official” and presumably immune: Trump’s efforts to pressure Pence into declining to certify Biden’s win. Although the filing acknowledges that the Court had held that these conversations between Trump and Pence about “their official responsibilities” qualified as “official,” it rebuts the presumption that those discussions therefore qualify as immune. The filing observes that the discussions did not concern Pence’s duties as president of the Senate “writ large,” but only his distinct duties overseeing the certification of a presidential election—a process in which a president, whether or not he is a candidate for reelection, has, by the Framers’ considered design, no official role.   

Here the logic of Smith’s argument cuts to the quick. By the Court majority’s own standard, as stated in its Trump v. United States decision, the presumption of immunity for official actions would disappear only if a prosecutor could demonstrate that bringing criminal charges against a president or former president would not present “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Because certification of a presidential election, the subject of Trump’s “official” pressuring, involves neither the authority nor the functions of the executive branch, the immunity claims concerning that pressuring are therefore groundless—according to the Court majority’s own logic.           

The rest of Trump and Pence’s interactions do not even qualify as official, Smith shows. In all of their other postelection, in-person conversations and private phone calls, Trump and Pence were acting not in their capacities as president and vice president but as running mates pondering their electoral prospects, even after Biden had been declared the winner. If, as the Court itself has stated, context is important with regard to speechmaking, so it is important with regard to communications between the top officials of the executive branch. To be sure, Smith allows, Trump and Pence “naturally may have touched upon arguably official responsibilities,” but “the overall context and content of the conversations demonstrate that they were primarily frank exchanges between two candidates on a shared ticket”—strictly unofficial conduct.

In all, by recasting the case against Trump in view of the Court’s immunity decision, Smith has drawn upon that very ruling to establish that none of Trump’s actions in connection with January 6 cited in the revised indictment is immune from prosecution. And in doing that, he has further discredited an already discredited Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, important as it is with respect to Smith’s specific case, the filing cannot come close to undoing the damage that Trump v. United States has wrought, with its authorization of an authoritarian American regime. The very fact that Smith had to omit from both his revised indictment and his filing Trump’s nefarious but official dealings with the Justice Department, including his brazen hiring and firing of top law-enforcement officials on the basis of who would do his personal bidding, shows how fearsomely the Court’s immunity decision has constrained the special counsel. There was a great deal more criminal behavior by Trump and his co-conspirators, as laid out in detail in the House January 6 committee report, that Smith could not touch because the Court has effectively immunized it as “official” activity under the executive branch’s authority.

These limitations show all over again how the Court has given the president absolute license to rule like a tyrant, against which even the ablest special counsel is virtually powerless. Nothing in Smith’s filing alleviates Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s judgment in her forthright dissent in Trump v. United States that the decision empowers the president, acting in his official capacity, to order the assassination of political rivals, to take a bribe in exchange for a pardon, to organize a military coup with impunity: “Immune, immune, immune.” That Smith managed to outsmart the Court as much as he did is a remarkable feat that could have important results—but only if Kamala Harris succeeds in winning the presidency.

On the basis of their past decisions, it is reasonable to expect that both the D.C. district court under Judge Chutkan and the U.S. Court of Appeals will rule in favor of Smith. Trump v. United States would then go once again before the Supreme Court. This will happen if Harris wins the election, because a Justice Department under her administration would almost certainly allow Smith to remain to continue prosecution of Trump. What, then, would the Court do? Would it uphold those decisions and throw Trump upon the mercy of a D.C. federal jury? Or would it strike those decisions down, thereby redoubling the disgrace it earned the first time around?  

The only way the Court can avoid that dilemma is if Trump wins the election, an outcome that its conservative majority would now have all the more reason to desire. But what happens if, as seems highly possible, the election leads to litigation, much as the 2020 election did, only this time the Court is left to make the final decision? Will the Court then intervene as Trump’s enabler once again, installing him as a constitutionally tainted president, allowing him to kill the indictment against him, and to pardon those convicted of violent crimes in the attack on the Capitol whom he calls “hostages”? The Court, in Trump v. United States, claimed that it was protecting the sanctity of the presidency, but if it aids Trump in his attempt to escape justice for his January 6 insurrection, it will further seal its illegitimacy while also sealing MAGA’s triumph—and, with that, the majority of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, will pay a crushing price.

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Western North Carolina lies hundreds of miles inland from any coast. The counties around the Blue Ridge Mountains sit at high elevations, away from the dense flood zones along the Atlantic. The idea that more than a foot of rain would rapidly overwhelm the region, sweeping up homes and ripping up vegetation, seemed almost unthinkable. But a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall, at least 200 people have died, and the death toll is expected to rise as the floodwaters recede and the debris clears. Many inland residents in North Carolina have never experienced flooding like this in their lifetime, and only a sliver have the flood insurance necessary to help them rebuild.

Flood insurance isn’t included in homeowner’s insurance, and Americans are generally not required to buy it. (One exception is the homeowners who live in high-risk areas, who must purchase flood insurance to get a federally backed mortgage.) Without this special coverage, floods can be “a huge financial shock to households,” Carolyn Kousky, the associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, told me. Those living in storm-torn areas without coverage are looking at a massive list of expenses—home repairs, debris removal, temporary lodging—that they may have to pay for out of pocket after Helene. Still, just a tiny share of homeowners currently own flood insurance. Most of the North Carolina counties hit hard by Helene did not fall within high-risk areas on flood maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency; one estimate found that less than 2.5 percent of homeowners in the region have flood insurance—and that number is even lower in some counties.

“In a perfect world, everyone with some degree of flood risk could and would carry flood insurance on their homes,” my colleague Zoë Schlanger, who covers climate change, told me. But the reality is that even some of the residents in flood-prone areas do not buy the plans because they are so expensive. The average premium cost $700 a year in 2019, but that number can reach the thousands for some coastal communities. Lower-income residents face an especially daunting situation: They are less likely to be able to afford flood insurance, and they also have less money on hand to rebuild.

Many people assume that they face little risk if they aren’t living in an area included in high-risk zones on FEMA’s flood maps, Sarah Pralle, a political-science professor at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, told me. But FEMA’s maps don’t capture the full picture of flood risk. They are drawn “based on the assumption that the past will help us predict the future. In a rapidly changing climate, that’s not the case.” The maps can quickly become outdated as climate risks evolve, she noted, and don’t take into account fluvial flooding, or flooding from heavy-rain events, which is what North Carolina saw last week. Even people who have personally experienced flooding sometimes drop their policies, Pralle said, adding that “if people have lived in a place where it hasn’t flooded in decades, they lose that memory of what can happen and what kind of losses they might suffer.”

Those who do buy flood insurance usually live in areas prone to flooding. The result is a system in which the risk is not evenly spread out, making flood-insurance premiums hugely pricey—Pralle likened it to a health-insurance system in which only the sick buy coverage. Some countries organize their disaster-insurance programs so everyone pays a flat rate, Kousky explained. In the United States, that would mean someone living on Florida’s coastline would pay the same premium as someone living on the top of a mountain. That’s a tough sell for many Americans, and overhauling the National Flood Insurance Program, which is saddled with debt, would be politically contentious.

Those without flood insurance will need to rely on a “patchwork” system of federal aid, loans, and charity, Kousky said, as they recover from Helene. One option is accepting government loans, but she noted that many people are not in a position to take on more debt after a hurricane—and their applications may be denied too. FEMA disaster-assistance grants are another pathway, and most of them do not need to be repaid—but those are “just an emergency stopgap,” Kousky said. They’re not designed to fully help people recover, usually providing only a few thousand dollars for each household—a fraction of what residents would need to rebuild.

The process of recovering from Helene is just beginning. Still, hurricane season is not over for the rest of the country, and FEMA currently does not have enough funding to make it through the rest of the season. Last week, President Joe Biden signed a short-term spending bill authorizing another $16 billion for the agency, but further funding would need to come from Congress, which is currently in recess until after the election.

So much of the response following disasters can feel piecemeal and reactive, Pralle said. Insurance is important—but not the full story. “Every dollar we put into prevention is going to be a lot more efficiently spent,” she explained. In a world reshaped by climate change, “this idea that there’s safe places you can go hide is unrealistic.”

Related:

North Carolina was set up for disaster. Hurricane Helene through the eyes of a former FEMA chief

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The rise of the right-wing tattletale America isn’t ready for the new reality of hurricane deaths. Gisèle Pelicot and the most unthinkable, ordinary crime

Today’s News

A court filing from Special Counsel Jack Smith was unsealed yesterday, revealing key evidence in his federal election-subversion case against Donald Trump. Israel will continue striking targets linked to Hezbollah in Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and southern Lebanon, according to the Israeli military chief. Kamel Ahmad Jawad, a resident of Dearborn, Michigan, was killed by an air strike in Lebanon on Tuesday, his family said in a statement. Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, was sentenced to nine years in prison for a data-breach scheme that involved tampering with voting machines used in the 2020 presidential election.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: In many domains, the conventional wisdom among progressives is mistaken, oversimplified, or based on wishful thinking, Rogé Karma writes. The economics of immigration is not one of them.

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Please Don’t Make Me Download Another App

By Ian Bogost

Fifteen years ago, an Apple ad campaign issued a paean to the triumph of the smartphone: There’s an app for that, it said. Today, that message sounds less like a promise than a threat. There’s an app for that? If only there weren’t.

Read the full article.

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What was the first October surprise of this election? Was it a strike by East Coast stevedores? Was it the threat of a hot war between Israel and Iran? Or was it the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page motion, unsealed yesterday, in the federal case against Donald Trump for subverting the 2020 presidential election?

The answer is almost certainly option D: none of the above. (And by the way, it’s only October 3.)

Smith’s filing seeks to convince Judge Tanya Chutkan that despite a Supreme Court decision this summer that grants presidents criminal immunity for actions taken in their official capacity, charges against Trump are still valid. It offers the most detailed portrait yet of Trump’s paperwork coup and his apparent malicious indifference to the sacking of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

The filing doesn’t change anything about the existing understanding of what happened in the weeks between Election Day 2020 and the riot, but it adds new information. Perhaps the most appalling detail concerns Trump’s reaction to news that Vice President Mike Pence had been evacuated from the Capitol because of a threat to his life. According to Smith, the president simply looked at the aide who delivered the news and said, “So what?” Overall, the filing underscores how serious a threat to rule of law and American democracy Trump was and is.

Still, don’t expect a major public reaction. The idea of an “October surprise,” a late-breaking story that shifts the race, dates to the Ronald Reagan era and has been a durable one. The 2016 presidential race saw two contenders: the Access Hollywood tape of Trump boasting about sexual assaults, and the reopening of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which may have actually swung the race. But like many vestiges of Reaganism, the October surprise looks like a thing of the past.

The signature characteristic of the 2024 presidential election is stasis. The only thing that has seriously shifted polling was Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris’s replacement of him on the Democratic ticket. Nothing else—not Biden’s disastrous debate, not the first assassination attempt on Trump, not the second—has resulted in a major change in polls. In 538’s average of polls, Harris has fluctuated between 44.2 and 48.6 percent of the vote, mostly tracking gradually upward. That’s a narrow band compared with the polling averages of past candidates, but Trump has stayed between 43.3 and 45.8 percent—a range of just 2.5 percentage points.

[Read: The journalist who cried treason]

This stability reflects the calcified state of American politics today: Americans are evenly divided politically and deeply polarized in their opinions. Voters have had extensive exposure to Trump and have generally made up their mind about him.

Horse-race realities aside, Smith’s filing shows why January 6 should hurt Trump. Smith is merely making accusations as a prosecutor, and the evidence has not been tried in court, but the document reinforces how egregious Trump’s alleged behavior was.

In Smith’s account, Trump knew he was lying about having won the 2020 election. He instigated the riot at the Capitol. And of course these actions had nothing to do with his official role as president. Smith also asserts that he has forensic and other evidence proving that Trump spent the afternoon of the riot doing exactly what many people assumed: sitting at the White House, watching Fox News and scrolling through Twitter, refusing for hours to do anything to pacify the rioters or defend the Capitol.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: a guide]

Trump’s flippant “So what?” response to the news that Pence had been evacuated wasn’t just coldhearted. It reveals that all he cared about was winning, no matter the facts or the cost. He didn’t care that Pence had eagerly debased himself to defend Trump throughout the administration, nor that Pence earnestly did not believe he had the power to throw the election to Trump. “You’re too honest,” Trump scoffed, according to Pence.

Trump had long made clear that his top priority is loyalty. He told FBI Director James Comey so in January 2017, and when Comey was insufficiently deferential, Trump fired him a few months later. During this week’s vice-presidential debate, the Democrat Tim Walz offered the Republican J. D. Vance a warning about how his running mate might treat him, given past experience. “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” Walz said.

[Read: Jack Smith isn’t backing down]

Pence failed the loyalty test, and he wasn’t just dead to Trump; Trump seemingly didn’t care whether he was dead. If this is how Trump treats a close ally, he leaves little doubt about how he’d treat anyone else. But to anyone who’s been paying attention these past several years, none of this information is at all surprising, and it won’t be remembered as an October surprise.