The coordinated campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris raised $361 million in August, nearly three times as much as the $130 million collected by the coordinated effort of her Republican rival, Donald Trump, giving her a clear financial edge with two months to go before Election Day, her campaign announced Friday.

Harris’s larger campaign, which boasts hundreds more staff, dozens more offices and a bigger advertising budget than Trump, also ended the month with more cash on hand. She has $404 million in cash to spend, her campaign said, compared with $295 million in cash at the end of August that the Trump campaign announced on Wednesday. The numbers cannot be verified until financial disclosures are filed later this month.

“What we have got right now is the kind of grassroots enthusiasm that money can’t buy,” deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty said about the month’s haul, which he attributed in part to several high-profile events, including the selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as a running mate, the Democratic convention and grassroots enthusiasm for her campaign.

He said the scale of the Harris operation, which has grown to include about 2,000 staff and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, means the money is needed to close out the race. “It gives us a really significant cash advantage, but that cash advantage is a bit deceptive because all that money is committed to the things we need to do to win.”

Harris has raised more than $615 million for her campaign and associated Democratic committees since she took over the campaign from President Joe Biden on July 21, the campaign said. The August donations came from nearly 3 million donors, including 1.3 million donors who gave for the first time this cycle. Flaherty said that among those new donors, 3 in 4 had not given to Biden’s campaign during the 2020 presidential race.

The totals include money that is given in smaller checks to the Harris campaign, as well as bigger donations to associated Democratic Party committees that can coordinate their efforts with the Harris campaign. The campaign said more than 60 percent of August donors were women and almost one-fifth of donors were registered Republicans or independents.

“Make no mistake: this election will be hard-fought and hard-won,” Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement. “But with the undeniable, organic support we are seeing, we are making sure we are doing everything possible to mobilize our coalition to defeat Donald Trump once and for all.”

The Trump campaign announced its August campaign haul on Wednesday, while expressing confidence that it had “the resources needed to propel President Trump’s campaign to victory.”

“With Republicans united and a growing number of Independents and disaffected Democrats crossing partisan lines, the Trump-Vance campaign has momentum for the final stretch of the race,” Trump campaign senior adviser Brian Hughes said in a statement. “These fundraising numbers from August are a reflection of that movement and will propel President Trump’s America First movement back to the White House so we can undo the terrible failures of Harris and Biden.”

When JD Vance became the Republican nominee for vice president, a speech he gave in April condemning the Ukrainian government for what he claimed was an “assault on traditional Christian communities” became a rallying cry for lobbyists hired by a lawyer of an ally of the Russian Orthodox patriarch.

“We commend Vance for taking a strong position on this issue and urge you to follow suit,” said a July 17 email sent to lawmakers on Capitol Hill by one of the lobbyists.

The email was just one of dozens in a campaign portraying Kyiv as anti-Christian that six congressional staffers say is aimed at undermining military support for Ukraine — an effort that is set to intensify after the Ukrainian parliament passed a law on Aug. 20 that bans religious organizations with ties to Russia. The legislation establishes a legal framework that, according to religious experts, could effectively close down the Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church connected to Moscow.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, or UOC-MP, has deep historical ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, which many U.S. and Ukrainian officials say has been an instrument of Russian foreign policy. The war has brought the church’s deep sympathy for Russia into stark relief, and Ukraine has launched criminal proceedings against dozens of UOC clergymen for allegedly assisting Russia, including collecting intelligence on the Ukrainian military and on the movement of weapons, according to Ukraine’s Security Service.

A key element of communications between the lobbyists and lawmakers was the suggestion that the lawmakers should make further aid to Ukraine conditional on preserving the UOC, according to three Republican congressional staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Vance had made the connection explicit in his speech. “That will be … our shame for refusing to use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to Ukraine as leverage to ensure and guarantee real religious freedom,” he said. Asked about those remarks, a spokesperson for the senator said that Vance “has made clear he is concerned by the persecution of Christian communities anywhere in the world.”

The government of President Volodymyr Zelensky has said it merely wants to see an independent Orthodox Church in Ukraine, one that is not beholden to a government and hierarchy in Moscow that is trying to destroy the Ukrainian state.

But the law has drawn criticism both from the pope, who said last month that he felt “concerned about the freedom of those who pray,” and from the Kremlin, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying last week that the law was “a blatant attack on religious freedom, an attack on the Orthodox Church and, in general, an attack on Christianity, on real Christianity.”

Leading the campaign in the United States against Kyiv’s efforts to create what it says is a Ukrainian Orthodox Church free of Moscow’s influence is Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian American attorney whose firm has offices in Washington and London.

Amsterdam claimed in an interview, without providing evidence, that Ukraine’s Security Service is “torturing” Ukrainian Orthodox priests for speaking Russian. There hasn’t been anything like this “since the Nazis,” he said.

Amsterdam’s arguments about Ukraine were similar to a propaganda campaign laid out by Kremlin political strategists in internal 2023 Kremlin documents, part of a cache obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The campaign called for portraying Ukraine as having “turned into an anti-Christian society,” while those in Zelensky’s administration were to be portrayed as behaving like “Nazis” in their efforts to subdue the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Amsterdam, who was brought in to work on the issue by Vadim Novinsky, a Russian Ukrainian tycoon with close ties to the top leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, says he is focused solely on the issue of religious freedom, not Moscow’s agenda. “You can’t ban a church. It’s completely contrary to the rule of law,” he said. “I never got involved in funding arguments. I never spoke against Ukraine.” In the emails to lawmakers, while condemning Ukraine for what they said was the “persecution of Ukrainian Christians,” the lobbyists have spoken of their “steadfast support” for Ukraine “against Russian aggression.” Amsterdam said part of his work for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was financed by Novinsky, but he declined to specify who else was financing him.

Ukrainian institutions and Ukrainian evangelical and Baptist leaders have responded with their own lobbying effort to influence U.S. lawmakers and the Republican base. They point to Russia’s actions oppressing Protestants and other faiths outside the Russian Orthodox sphere in the occupied territories.

Pavlo Unguryan, a Ukrainian evangelical leader, met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on several occasions earlier this year, while evangelical and Baptist chaplains have provided witness testimony about Russia’s closure of Christian churches outside the Russian Orthodox faith in the territories it has seized in Ukraine. They also provided documentation on the killing and jailing of evangelical and Baptist priests there, as well as the jailing and torture of Catholic priests. A spokesperson for Johnson did not respond to a request for comment. In a public Q&A at the Hudson Institute on July 8, Johnson spoke of how he met “multiple times” with Ukrainian religious leaders and pastors and said Russia had targeted them “specifically.”

Congressional staffers interviewed by The Post said they are nonetheless concerned by the degree to which Amsterdam’s campaign has influenced views among the Republican Party base, especially after Tucker Carlson aired interviews with Amsterdam about the issue, first in October 2023 and then again in April of this year.

Moscow or Constantinople

The Trump administration actively encouraged the Orthodox community in Ukraine to break with Moscow, according to two U.S. officials involved in the process. Concerns had emerged after 2014 about the role played by elements of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in assisting Russia in the illegal annexation of Crimea and the occupation of eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists.

As a result in part of efforts spearheaded by the State Department under Mike Pompeo, the Ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, the most senior in the Eastern Orthodox Church, granted autocephaly, or autonomy from the Moscow hierarchy, to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2019. That created a church that would come under the authority of Constantinople — a historic name that Orthodox believers use for Istanbul — rather than Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin bitterly opposed the move, but at the same time, the original Ukrainian Orthodox Church, with its connections to Russia, continued to exist. Under the newly elected Zelensky administration, individual parishes were given the right to choose which church they wanted to join — the one under Moscow or the OCU under Constantinople.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, it became clear that these measures were not enough, officials in Kyiv said.

“People understood [the UOC] was a fifth column of the Kremlin,” said Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

Metropolitan Kliment, a spokesperson for the UOC, denied this, saying the fifth column was made up of “those who divide Ukrainian society into right and wrong citizens.”

The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, praised the Russian invasion as part of a “holy war” and said Russian soldiers killed in the war would immediately go to heaven. In an attempt to officially distance the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its head, Metropolitan Onufriy, said three months after the invasion that the church was severing relations with Moscow and that its priests would no longer mention Kirill in public prayers.

An expert report commissioned by the Ukrainian government, however, found the measures were cosmetic and that critical canonical connections continued. “Essentially, all the decisions made by Onufriy are reversible,” said Cyril Hovorun, a former chief of staff to Kirill. Hovorun was defrocked by the Moscow patriarch in January after he took part in a liturgy with a Bishop from the church under Constantinople. “In case Putin wins the war, then everything can be restored to how it was.”

In addition, 26 UOC clergymen have already been convicted of assisting Russia, the Ukrainian Security Service said, and another 50 have been notified they are under investigation, officials said. In one instance, a priest in Bucha, the small town outside of Kyiv known for the atrocities committed by Russian troops during several weeks of occupation, was found to have assisted Russian troops in identifying locals likely to resist.

Amsterdam said UOC priests and bishops are being charged and arrested merely for “saying anything that sounds like something Putin might have said.” He raised the example of Metropolitan Theodosy, a bishop under house arrest for a series of lectures at the Theological Academy in Kyiv in which he laid out the ecclesiastical position of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The authorities in Kyiv said the bishop “incited interconfessional hatred” and had also sought to create a website under the emblem of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In interviews, and in videos posted on a website called savetheuoc.com, Amsterdam has claimed that Ukrainian authorities’ “persecution” of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has led to the forced closure of 1,500 Ukrainian Orthodox churches.

Religious experts, however, say many of the congregations moved voluntarily to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the one independent from Moscow, in protest after the invasion, with over 2,000 former UOC congregations joining the OCU in the past two years, according to Lauren Homer, president of Law and Liberty International, a D.C.-based religious freedom advocacy group.

‘God’s grace’

From his office in London’s upscale Belgravia, Amsterdam portrays himself as defending religious freedom amid a mainstream Western discourse in which “it is dangerous to be thought of as anything other than aggressively Russophobic.”

Amsterdam also claims he is an enemy of the Putin regime, banned from Russia because of his high-profile work in the early 2000s defending Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Documents reviewed by The Post show that in mid-2023, Amsterdam was discussing a $1 million annual contract to work for a powerful Kremlin-linked lobbying group, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), against Western sanctions imposed on Russia. The RSPP was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on Aug. 11, 2023.

“Amsterdam & Partners is ready to represent Russian business in the procedure of contesting sanctions, initiating a broad public discussion about the sanctions policy of Great Britain,” states a June 28, 2023, memo by the RSPP, which was obtained by the European intelligence service. “The lawyers are ready to take on the reputational risks and public disapproval inevitably connected with active criticism of the sanctions.”

Amsterdam said he doesn’t represent the RSPP and didn’t sign the contract because they could not agree on the conditions. He said he refused to contest sectoral sanctions connected to Russian technology and the military because he was against Russia’s war, but added that he was ready to campaign against sanctions imposed on individuals who, he claimed, had been “wrongfully targeted solely on the basis of wealth.” The RSPP declined to comment.

Soon after his discussion with the RSPP, on Aug. 22, 2023, Amsterdam said that he was hired by Novinsky, the Russian Ukrainian oligarch, first to represent him over sanctions imposed by the Ukrainian government, a role that has expanded to include Amsterdam’s work on the Orthodox Church.

Novinsky made his fortune in the oil trade in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, together with a close associate of Putin’s. He later expanded his business into Ukraine, becoming a citizen of that country and a prominent supporter of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He was often seen alongside Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, during the patriarch’s official visits to Ukraine and during Novinsky’s visits to Russia, reports and photographs show. Amsterdam said Novinsky would not comment for this article.

To lead the campaign on Capitol Hill, Amsterdam hired the law firm of Nelson Mullins and its senior policy adviser Ron Klink, a former Pennsylvania congressman, according to filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and emails to congressional staffers seen by The Post, and William Burke-White, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former adviser to the State Department during the Obama administration, according to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Amsterdam also took part in some of the meetings with the staffers of lawmakers, according to interviews with congressional staffers.

Amsterdam initially said his firm did not register its work under FARA because of an exemption in the law for representation of religious organizations. One lawyer specializing in FARA law said the exemption extended only to purely religious activities.

“The exemption generally does not apply unless your activities are purely religious and do not also involve what the law calls political activities. The definition of political activity includes any attempt to influence the U.S. government with reference to U.S. policy or to influence any segment of the U.S. public with reference to the public or political interests of any foreign nation,” said Joshua Ian Rosenstein, a partner at the Sandler Reiff law firm, which specializes in FARA and other lobbying-registration questions. “I think they would have an uphill battle demonstrating it is purely religious and nonpolitical as defined by the law.”

Amsterdam’s law firm later told The Post that the firm’s work was also covered by separate FARA exemptions for representing clients in legal proceedings and engaging in “activities not serving predominantly a foreign interest.”

Rosenstein said the validity of these exemption claims would depend largely on the specifics of the engagement, such as the “content and messaging of the lobbying activities” and the extent to which the activities are directed by a foreign government. “All of those are factual questions,” he said.

Amsterdam maintains that the firm’s work is strictly limited to protecting religious freedom. “We have never spoken out against Ukraine on any other issue,” he said. “Our firm’s representation is compliant with all relevant laws.”

A spokesperson for Nelson Mullins said the firm did not comment on clients.

Burke-White registered under FARA as acting for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and in an initial filing dated Nov. 5, said he was paid $7,000 by Amsterdam’s law firm to make contact with senators including Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), as well as with the White House, staff members with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom. He said in an email that $7,000 was the total he earned for that period and added: “Banning a church outright through legislative acts and, thereby, denying individuals from worshiping in the church of their choice simply cannot be reconciled with international human rights obligations and the freedom of religion.” In a later filing on May 31, Burke-White said he was terminating his registration due to the religious exemption, the legal exemption and the waiver for activities not directed by or directly promoting the interests of a foreign government.

In response to some of the criticism of the law, a Ukrainian government commission will first determine whether the UOC is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church before it can make a legal filing that could effectively close the church down. It also grants the UOC a nine-month grace period in which it can choose to fully sever relations with Moscow.

Some UOC parishioners, however, say they could not join a church under Constantinople that they view as “schismatic” and created as a political project, fearing they would not remain in “God’s grace.”

“We can’t join with the thieves who have betrayed canonical law,” said one UOC supporter, Nikolai Moisiienko, in an interview.

Ukraine, in the meantime, has been ramping up its efforts to court American Christians, with Kyiv Global Outreach, a nonprofit organization affiliated with the Kyiv School of Economics, hiring the Washington PR firm DCI Group and contracting it to spend $3.6 million on outreach throughout 2024, FARA filings show. Gary Marx, a prominent evangelical and Republican strategist who was hired by DCI, has dispatched Ukrainian evangelicals to present their case across the United States, speaking at the Republican National Convention, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The pendulum is starting to swing back,” Marx said in an interview. “Those voices that had started to buy into the Russian narratives are realizing they are not on the winning side of that argument.”

Family members of three people who will appear near the top of voters’ 2024 ballots have spoken out against their own kin. If you’re looking for something that epitomizes our polarized political age, that’s surely it.

But as Donald Trump and his allies seek to play up supposed political discord in Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz’s family, they might want to slow their roll a bit.

If family members are any gauge of a politician’s character, Trump fares much worse than Walz. The familial attacks lodged at Trump and his new ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are simply on a different level — both compared to Walz and historically.

To recap: This weekend we learned that Walz’s brother Jeff Walz wrote on Facebook that he was “100% opposed” to his brother’s ideology. He said Tim Walz is not the “type of character” who should be making major decisions for the country. “The stories I could tell,” Jeff Walz added.

Then a photo emerged purporting to be other members of Walz’s family wearing “Nebraska Walz’s for Trump” T-shirts.

“His brother endorsed me, and the whole family endorsed me,” Trump claimed Wednesday night on Fox News. Fox hosts and right-wing media have played up the stories.

Trump’s claim is characteristically false, though; Jeff Walz hasn’t endorsed Trump, and neither has anything even close to Walz’s “whole family.”

Even as Trump and his allies were highlighting the Walz family, the likelihood of true familial discord fizzled. Jeff Walz appeared on NewsNation and downplayed the supposed dirt he had on his brother, while saying he wouldn’t get involved in the campaign. We also learned Wednesday night that the “Nebraska Walz’s for Trump” were apparently distant cousins — so distant that Walz’s sister didn’t recognize them. (The AP reported they are descendants of Walz’s great-uncle.)

The resulting picture is of a politically opposed, estranged brother briefly stumbling into the national spotlight and just as quickly begging for the exits, and effective strangers who share a bloodline opting to be photographed opposing Walz. That’s not nothing, but it’s not close to what Trump claimed.

As notably, nor is it close to what Trump’s own family has said about him — or what Kennedy’s family has said about their estranged relative.

Both Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, and his nephew, Fred Trump III, have now written critical books about Trump and spoken out against his character in no uncertain terms.

Mary Trump in 2020 said Trump demonstrates “sociopathic tendencies,” while adding that the then-president is “utterly incapable of leading this country, and it’s dangerous to allow him to do so.” She not only opposed him but called for him to resign.

Fred Trump III more recently said Trump last year suggested that his nephew’s mentally and physically disabled son should be left to die to avoid further medical expenses: “He said, he doesn’t recognize you, let him die and move down to Florida.”

The siblings had visited Trump at the White House, but they ultimately decided to blow the whistle on him.

Mary Trump also recorded Trump’s sister, former federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, saying that Trump had “no principles” and that “you can’t trust him.” Fred Trump III now says he witnessed Maryanne Trump Barry writing an op-ed opposing her brother in 2016, but that it was never published. (Maryanne Trump Barry, who died last year, never publicly came out against her brother.)

The other big example this election cycle is Kennedy, who suspended his campaign recently and endorsed Trump but will remain on many states’ ballots.

Numerous members of Kennedy’s famous Democratic family, including no fewer than six siblings, denounced his independent campaign and backed the Democratic ticket. They cited his “deplorable and untruthful remarks” about covid, his vaccine conspiracy theories and “his poor judgment and tenuous relationship with the truth.”

It’s difficult to find comparable historical examples of the kinds of things family members have said about Trump and Kennedy.

There was a spate of this kind of thing during the 2018 campaign, but at a much lower level. Six siblings of Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) appeared in a campaign ad against him. Another candidate’s brother appeared in an ad against him. A candidate in Missouri was denounced by two of his children as a bigot. And the parents of the GOP Wisconsin Senate candidate quickly donated the maximum amounts to the Democrat he sought to unseat, shortly after the Republican entered the race.

One of the earliest female members of Congress, Rep. Coya Knutson (D-Minn.), lost reelection after her husband signed a public letter titled, “Coya, Come Home.” (The letter is believed by many to have been the work of political operatives.)

And back in 1920 — in my favorite example — presidential son Theodore Roosevelt Jr. campaigned for Republican Warren G. Harding even as Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin, was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee. By 1924, both FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt responded during Theodore Jr.’s run for New York governor by campaigning against him. Eleanor Roosevelt even traveled the state in a teapot-themed car in an attempt to tie Theodore Roosevelt Jr., whom Harding had appointed assistant secretary of the Navy, to the Harding administration’s Teapot Dome scandal.

A century later, candidates’ family members are making an increasing number of political splashes. It’s just that some ripples are a lot bigger than others.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Western nations on Friday to lift restrictions on the use of donated weapons against Russian territory, telling military and defense leaders gathered in Germany that it was “wrong” to tie his country’s hands in battling Russia’s forces.

Zelensky, in his first in-person appearance at a U.S.-led forum of nations providing arms to Ukraine, expressed gratitude for ongoing military support but said more is needed to help end the protracted conflict with Russia.

“We think it is wrong that there are such steps,” he said. “We need to have this long-range capability, not only on the occupied territory of Ukraine but also on the Russia territory, yes, so that Russia is motivated to seek peace.”

Zelensky’s appeal, delivered at a U.S. military base in Germany hosting the meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, underscores the stakes of the current battlefield moment for Kyiv. Ukraine is struggling to contain Russian progress in the east while its forces also advance deeper into Russia itself.

The United States, Ukraine’s largest single provider of weapons, has supplied billions of dollars worth of arms since the war erupted in February 2022, but Washington has so far refused to lift restrictions on the use of longer-range arms such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to strike deep inside Russia. The Biden administration currently permits Ukraine to use U.S.-provided missiles only in limited cross-border strikes.

While Washington has repeatedly set aside concerns about escalation with nuclear-armed Russia and eventually yielded to Ukrainian requests related to weapons access or use, it is unclear when or if it will do so this time.

U.S. officials have long said they believe that allowing Ukraine to use ATACMS to hit sites far inside Russia would not alter the overall military balance because Russia can simply move launchers or other potential targets farther out of range.

John Kirby, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told reporters on Thursday ahead of the meeting in Germany that administration policy has not changed.

“We are, as we have been every day … having a conversation with our Ukrainian counterparts about what they need, what’s going on on the battlefield, and what support they require to continue to have success,” he said.

Speaking alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who convened Friday’s meeting at Ramstein Air Base, Zelensky said his forces have managed to outfight Russia in many instances with “a minimum of weaponry.”

“But we need more weapons to drive Russian forces off our land and especially in the Donetsk region,” he said.

Zelensky cited the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has appeared to prioritize his military’s push to seize the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk over tackling Ukrainian forces in Russia’s Kursk region.

The incursion into Russia, where Ukrainian forces have seized a modest amount of territory in recent weeks, came as a surprise to many in the West and left some of Ukraine’s backers wondering how the offensive will affect the course of the war.

Putin “doesn’t care about Russian land and people. He just wants to grab as much land and as many of our cities as possible,” Zelensky said.

The Ukrainian leader also called for prompt delivery of promised arms packages and said more air defense weapons are needed to protect Ukrainians. A strike on the central Ukrainian city of Poltava this week demonstrated Ukraine’s vulnerability, killing more than 50 people.

“The world has enough air defense systems to ensure that Russian terror does not have results,” he said.

Austin, speaking after Zelensky at the beginning of the contact group discussions, said the United States shares his sense of urgency to prevail on the battlefield, but he did not address Zelensky’s comments about U.S. policy.

“We are laser-focused on Ukraine’s needs, including air defense, fires and armor,” he said.

There are a few things that are particularly useful to remember about former president Donald Trump.

One is that he operates under the assumption that he can simply talk his way out of any situation. It’s likely that this stems from his career as a salesperson: that he learned to say whatever he needed to close a deal — and then to say whatever he needed to clean up the mess from the promises he made at the outset.

Another is that he internalizes sales pitches that work. Like many salespeople, he develops a patter, a series of phrases and pitches. Those lines come out spontaneously and effortlessly, to the point that he has often winnowed them down to just their most basic elements. Instead of saying that President Joe Biden’s administration was unsuccessful for various reasons, he just says things like, “America is a failing country.”

A third thing to remember about Trump is that the sell he’s working on now isn’t focused on votes. That’s ancillary, the way that securing agreements to use the name “Trump” for marketing was ancillary. What he’s aiming for instead is applause and approval. During his speeches, that’s what he’s trying to achieve. That’s what his riffs are aimed at. He’s building a voter base the way he built a market, by getting people to approve of him. This is why he tracks crowd size so closely.

On Thursday, his push to be elected for a second term as president brought him to the Economic Club of New York. The organization prides itself on its sober, informed assessments of the economic and political worlds, meaning that Trump was already somewhat disadvantaged. His politics are not predicated on his grasp of policy but on appeals to the politically disaffected. His descriptions of how things are working are much more effective with people who don’t know how things work.

But the question that tripped him up, the one that launched a thousand criticisms and not a few memes, was one focused on something that he should theoretically have had a grasp on: child care.

“If you win in November,” a panelist asked, “can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?”

Here is Trump’s entire answer, verbatim.

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio [(R-Fla.)] and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.”

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.”

“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.”

“But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”

“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”

Particularly when removed from the context of the rest of his comments, the response reads like gibberish. A few days after his running mate mocked Vice President Kamala Harris by comparing her to the fumbling, desperate answer of a pageant contestant back in 2007, Trump offered a much more convincing re-creation.

The media does admittedly often polish Trump’s claims in a way that obscures the circuity of the route he took to get there. In this case, though, it’s useful to establish at the outset what he was trying to say, in part because it helps explain how he ended up taking this particular path and in part because it doesn’t serve as much more of an endorsement.

This was the last question Trump answered at the event, one in which he was focused centrally on making the case for his economic policies. Those policies were delineated during his prepared remarks and focused heavily on the use of tariffs. So what he ended up saying, in essence, was that he was going to generate so much money from policies like tariffs — price increases that disproportionately came out of Americans’ pockets — that paying for child care would be easy.

But, at the outset, he clearly didn’t know what he was going to say. He had suddenly been thrust into a dark, smoke-filled room and had to find the exit.

He started a few times.

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down,” he began, likely preparing to claim (as he so often does) that a specific policy was being prepared and would be produced within a few weeks (as he so rarely does).

But then he appears to have remembered that this was something he had actually talked about with people (or seen people talking about it on TV). Like his daughter and, perhaps, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who introduced legislation on child care earlier this year.

“You know,” he transitioned, “I was, uh, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue.”

It wasn’t going well. And when Trump is scrambling for an exit, his instinct is to find one from which he can hear the muffled sounds of applause emanating.

“It’s a very important issue,” he told the questioner. He was starting over, looking to build a rapport. He continued down that path, fumbling through the dark.

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care,” he said. ‘It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.”

You can see him figuring out what he’s going to say even as he is patting the questioner on the head.

“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly,” he continued. “And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.”

This is the patter kicking in. He’s going to tax the foreign manufacturers at levels they’ve never seen before! He’s going to fix our problems with One Simple Trick.

But then, it seems, he realized that he was drifting away from the actual question, which asked for a specific policy. So he wound back to that.

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time,” he said. “Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country—”

This is a reference to his earlier promise to put Elon Musk in charge of a commission that would find the places where the government was wasting at least a third of the money it spent. This is … an overestimate of how much spending is wasted. But Trump was looping back to more comfortable, better-worn terrain closer to the overall thrust of his speech.

“Because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with child care,” he continued, “but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.” He riffed on this a little more.

That was the answer, though: that this unrealistic promise of eliminating the deficit by increasing tariffs (and, by extension, costs for Americans) and uprooting trillions of dollars in wasteful or fraudulent spending would leave the country’s coffers so flush that he would pay for child care. Which is certainly what his party would want to prioritize over tax cuts, right?

Anyway, Trump finally found the door, closing out his answer the way he likes to conclude his rallies.

“We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first,” he said. “This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again.”

The audience applauded.

“We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation,” Trump concluded, with almost palpable relief. “So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.”

And that was that. Sale made — if only in the room and only for a moment.