For much of the 2024 election, concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and job performance helped paper over the real and long-standing concerns Americans have had about Donald Trump’s character, chaotic style and authoritarian tendencies. A slew of polls actually showed Biden had little to no advantage on the subject of which candidate was more trusted to protect democracy — despite months of Democrats focusing on democracy and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, which dealt a blow to the bedrock democratic principle of a peaceful transfer of power.

But as with many other facets of the race, Biden’s exit and Vice President Kamala Harris’s entry have significantly shifted the threat matrix, to the point where the fear factor again looms as a real problem for Trump.

To the extent this election is about Americans worrying about the candidates harming the country, it seems Harris has a real advantage. New polling from CNN gets at this in a better way than anything else in recent weeks.

The swing-state polling asked, as CNN has before, about whether voters viewed the candidates as “too extreme.” But then it took things a step further and asked people who agreed with the statement that a candidate was “too extreme” whether that candidate was also “so extreme that they pose a threat to the country.”

Across six key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — an average of 54 percent of registered voters said Trump was “too extreme,” with 48 percent also saying that he threatens the country. In each state, at least half of voters said Trump was “too extreme,” and at least 46 percent said he was a threat to the country.

Harris’s numbers were significantly lower: An average of 44 percent said she was “too extreme,” and just 39 percent regarded her perceived extremeness as a threat to the country. In no state did a majority regard her as too extreme; most voters instead regarded her as “generally mainstream.”

The gaps are similar among independent voters, with nearly half (an average of 47 percent) saying Trump was a threat to the country, compared to just 38 percent for Harris.

And Republicans were significantly more likely to regard their own party’s candidate as both too extreme and a threat to the country. Fully 14 percent of Trump’s own party said he was too extreme, and 7 percent said he was a threat (compared to 6 percent and 2 percent, respectively, for Harris).

An average of 3 percent of Trump supporters across these states actually said Trump was so extreme that he was a threat to the country but that they were still voting for him (perhaps either because they didn’t see the threat as significant enough, and/or because they felt he was still preferable).

While this is the most substantial recent polling on how voters view the relative threats posed by the candidates, it’s not the first to show Trump is viewed as a bigger threat — or even that about half that country views him as some kind of threat.

A Syracuse University/Ipsos poll last month showed a majority of Americans said Trump was either a major threat (43 percent) or minor threat (11 percent) “to the American democratic system and rule of law.” Four in 10 regarded Harris as a major (32 percent) or minor (8 percent) threat.

These findings mark a significant shift in the relative perceived threats of the two major-party candidates from when Biden led the Democratic ticket.

I mentioned at the top that being a “threat to democracy” was more of a wash than Democrats had hoped. A Public Religion Research poll late last year showed something similar: 57 percent regarded a Trump 2024 victory as a “threat to American democracy and way of life,” but 53 percent said the same of Biden.

There’s a real question about how much this matters. The percentages in the CNN poll who labeled Trump a threat was shy of a majority, meaning this could largely be voters who are predisposed against him.

But it’s still majorities who say he’s at least “too extreme,” and all his numbers are significantly higher than they are for Harris. That suggests Harris has a powerful motivating tool — fear — to get voters to turn out, in a way Trump no longer does.

Jury selection is set to begin Thursday in Los Angeles for the second criminal trial of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter — a case that over the next few weeks could detail for a jury his lavish lifestyle while he was addicted to drugs.

The younger Biden was convicted by a Delaware jury in June on three felony gun charges in an unrelated case that stems from the same period of his life, from around 2015 to 2019.

But the tax trial will unfold at a moment when there is less political scrutiny on Hunter Biden, now that his father has decided not to seek reelection. Still, it takes place as the president is attempting to bolster his legacy and focus on the few months he has left in office.

Hunter Biden is accused of failing to pay at least $1.4 million in federal taxes from 2016 through 2019. Prosecutors also allege that when he filed his taxes, he wrongfully wrote off payments as business expenses — including payments to sex workers, membership to a sex club and fancy car rentals. The charges include failing to file and pay taxes, tax evasion and filing false tax returns. Three are felonies and six are misdemeanors.

Biden has pleaded not guilty to the charges. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, to oversee the Biden prosecutions as special counsel — an appointment that gives Weiss more independence and clear authority to bring charges outside Delaware.

Hunter Biden’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said at a pretrial hearing last month that Biden paid his taxes for much of his adult life but that and his mindset while he was actively using and addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine led him to being delinquent. The lawyer said the fact that his client eventually paid his taxes in full is evidence that he wasn’t trying to evade the government.

“Why would somebody file the tax return, why would they clean up or try to clean up their mess, and then subsequently pay if they were trying to evade,” Geragos said at the hearing. “And why are they so afraid of a jury hearing that inference — that information?”

Federal prosecutors argued that Biden’s payment after the fact is irrelevant to the charges. They plan to detail the extravagant ways Biden spent his money instead of paying his taxes.

In a blow to the defense, Judge Mark Scarsi ruled that Biden’s attorneys cannot tell the jury that Biden eventually paid his taxes. Scarsi, who was appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2020, also limited how much Biden’s legal team could discuss his addiction and the personal traumas that they say led to his drug use.

Criminal prosecutions of tax evasion are rare, and legal experts say it is even rarer for someone to be charged once they have already paid their taxes.

“You don’t spend those resources chasing those cases,” said Brian Galle, a tax law professor at Georgetown University and a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s tax division. “One of the things that the criminal penalties in the tax system is supposed to do is to get people to cooperate and pay. So if you have someone who does cooperate and pay, usually that is going to be a lower priority.”

Biden has altered his legal team since his Delaware trial, with his recent top lawyer Abbe Lowell taking a lesser role in the upcoming case. Instead, Biden has enlisted Geragos, a well known Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney whose past clients include Michael Jackson; President Bill Clinton’s brother Roger Clinton Jr.; singer Chris Brown, who pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna; and Colin Kaepernick, the former 49ers quarterback who sued the NFL.

Prosecutors said they plan to call fewer than 30 witnesses. The judge estimates the trial will take about two weeks.

The gun trial in Delaware — in which Biden was convicted of lying about his drug use on a federal form required to purchase a gun — focused heavily on his addiction. There was little discussion of Biden paying prostitutes or how Biden earned his money.

The Los Angles trial, however, is expected to delve into some of the controversial foreign business deals Biden pursued while his father was vice president and his payments to sex workers.

In some of their filings, prosecutors have focused in particular on Hunter Biden’s arrangements with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, Chinese energy executives and a Romanian real estate tycoon named Gabriel Popoviciu. Biden was being paid millions of dollars from those deals during the time period in which he was not paying taxes.

The exhibits that prosecutors may draw from, according to legal filings, are tax forms for Hallie Biden — who is Hunter Biden’s former sister-in-law and ex-lover — and for her sister, Elizabeth Secundy, as well as divorce and financial records from Hunter Biden’s ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle.

The judge granted an order to compel Hallie Biden and Secundy to testify, according to court filings.

Another person who could figure into the trial is Lunden Roberts, a woman with whom Hunter Biden had a child. After DNA testing confirmed the child was his, they settled a long-standing child support case last year. Prosecutors have listed as possible evidence text messages and emails involving Roberts, as well as tax forms from a period in which she was working for Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden has a close relationship with his father, and the two have spent much of the past two weeks vacationing with the rest of their family in private, in California and at their home in Rehoboth Beach, Del.

This week marks a shift, with President Biden back at the White House and starting to campaign with Harris, and Hunter Biden preparing to report to federal court. Around the time the proceedings are scheduled to begin in the Los Angeles federal court, the president is scheduled to depart the White House for La Crosse, Wis., to deliver remarks on his administration’s policies in a key swing state.

Since a jury found him guilty of the gun charges in Delaware, Hunter Biden enters this second trial as a convicted felon. If he is convicted again, that criminal history would likely make his sentence on the tax charges more severe.

One way to try to avoid a harsh sentence would be to consider a plea deal. There has been little indication of any such talks gaining much traction, according to people familiar with conversations between prosecutors and the defense team. But discussions can move quickly in the final hours before a trial begins.

Allies of Hunter Biden have speculated that his father might consider pardoning him before leaving office, even though the president said he would not do so after the Delaware verdict — and his spokesperson has reiterated that.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked on Aug. 14 whether he would press for Harris to pardon his son, were she to win the election.

“That’s a hypothetical,” she responded. “He said he would not pardon his son. And I’m just going to leave it there.”

The top U.S. diplomat planned to visit the struggling nation of Haiti on Thursday, in an unusual attempt to boost the country’s interim leader and deliver a message of support for a U.S.-backed international policing mission that has so far failed to make a significant impact against the gangs that have seized control of most of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken more often visits countries where the United States can deliver a clear message of hope and assistance. In Haiti, the narrative is far less crystalline, and observers and political activists say the country may be at its most fragile in years. Interim Prime Minister Garry Conille has been in office since June, and analysts say he has so far failed to deliver badly needed stability. A Kenya-led policing mission that began this summer, meanwhile, has been plagued by miscommunication and is understaffed and underfunded, observers say.

Haiti plunged into chaos after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, throwing the country’s already weak institutions into disarray and opening the door to armed gangs to take over increasingly large parts of Port-au-Prince, ports and other critical areas inside the country. Now the paramilitary control about 80 percent of the capital. Earlier this year, they shut down the country’s main airport while then-Prime Minister Ariel Henry was on a diplomatic trip abroad, eventually forcing his resignation.

“This is a crucial moment in Haiti,” Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols told reporters ahead of the visit. “We’re seeing that forward movement on the security side that we’ve long waited for. But we also need to see progress on the political side, and engaging the transitional presidential council, the prime minister and Haiti’s political parties is a priority for the secretary to make sure that progress towards elections moves forward.”

Coming two months ahead of the U.S. presidential election, the trip is a gamble for Blinken, who, though he steers clear of domestic politics, risks calling attention to an unresolved international challenge that if mismanaged could lead to a flood of migration. Elections have not been held in the Caribbean nation of 12 million since 2016. Roughly 5 percent of the population, 578,000 people, has been displaced by violence, according to the United Nations. In the first half of the year, at least 3,884 Haitians were killed or injured in the fighting, the United Nations said.

“The fragility of the country, you can’t exaggerate it. And the incapacity of the government to do anything of significance to change the situation is unfortunately very high,” said Robert Fatton, a Haitian-born scholar of Haitian politics at the University of Virginia. “I don’t know what is going to be the result of the trip except that the U.S. will show that it supports Conille and money will be given, but that is still kind of a containment strategy.”

Blinken is the senior-most U.S. official to visit Haiti since his predecessor John F. Kerry traveled to the country in 2015.

The United States has a long and tortured record of interventions in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. It retains significant political influence in the country, but its history also shadows any effort to bolster security there. President Joe Biden has ruled out any deployment of U.S. troops.

Instead, his administration led an effort to build an international policing mission there after Haitian leaders requested assistance in October 2022 but has struggled to get countries to sign on. About 400 Kenyan police officers finally deployed in July and are expected soon to be joined by Jamaican police forces.

The Biden administration has pledged $360 million toward the mission, including equipment such as armored MRAP vehicles initially developed for Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the initial deployment of Kenyan forces has so far failed to make a dent in the violence, observers say, amid concerns that the African officers speak neither French nor Creole and a growing perception among Haitians that they are unwilling to put themselves at risk to push back on the gangs.

“There’s a perception that they’re not doing anything,” said James Beltis, an activist and one of the founders of an anti-corruption group, “Nou pap dòmi,” or “We aren’t sleeping.”

U.S. officials have indicated an openness to seeking U.N. approval for a peacekeeping mission — though many Haitians have bad memories of a U.N. mission that ran from 2004 to 2017 and was linked to sexual violence and a cholera epidemic that killed 10,000 people.

After Thursday’s trip to Haiti, Blinken plans to travel to the Dominican Republic, where the newly reelected government recently allowed the U.S. government to seize the plane of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Mérancourt reported from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

PHOENIX — The catered Lebanese dinner had ended, and the guests’ plates had been cleared. Now Massad Boulos, whose son Michael is married to Donald Trump’s daughter Tiffany, was holding forth with Arab American voters and explaining why — despite what they may have heard — the former president is their best bet for ending Israel’s war in Gaza.

At first glance, it was an unlikely scene. But some Arab and Muslim Americans, constituencies that tend to lean Democratic, have been galvanized this election cycle by a sense that their party has betrayed them.

The administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent in November, has been unable to stop a major U.S. ally’s devastating military campaign, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities. Throughout the world, many Arabs and Muslims have come to see Israel’s actions as a genocide, while in America, about 750,000 people channeled their anger by voting “uncommitted” in the Democratic primaries, rather than align behind the incumbent.

For Boulos, who calls himself Trump’s “envoy” to Arab and Muslim American communities, to assert in this setting that Trump would be a better friend to Palestinians is still no easy sell. The former president’s standing within these communities often is overshadowed by his past rhetoric and policies appearing to vilify Muslims and Arabs — including a social media post Sunday that appeared to show Muslim men burning an American flag. “Meet your new neighbors if Kamala wins. Vote Trump 2024,” it read.

But what if some could be persuaded to vote for Trump anyway?

In a tight presidential election that pollsters predict is likely to be decided on the margins, Boulos, 54, reasons that a little outreach could make all the difference. “Our community in Arizona is so big and so important, we can make a difference. We can make sure we get that margin,” he told the group that night in late August.

As Trump’s representative to Arab and Muslim American voters — a role the Trump campaign does not dispute — Boulos over the past few months has made six trips to Michigan, a critical swing state and home to the largest Arab American population, where uncommitted voters accounted for 13 percent of Democratic primary votes cast. Now he was in swing state Arizona, with more outreach here and elsewhere still to come, he said.

Boulos, who said he is a longtime proponent of the GOP, got to know Trump after their children began dating in 2018, and he drew closer to the former president after Michael and Tiffany married at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach estate, in 2022. He has roots in Lebanon and said he now splits time between South Florida and Nigeria, where he oversees his family’s billion-dollar conglomerate, SCOA Nigeria.

Trump in the past has given family members critical roles within his campaign and administration, notably his staunchly pro-Israel son-in-law Jared Kushner, who served as an adviser and Middle East liaison. Boulos says that he has no formal role with the campaign but that he and Trump have had numerous conversations about the Middle East and Gaza, and that Trump has appeared receptive.

The war, which began 11 months ago after Hamas-led militants carried out a stunning cross-border attack on Israel, has reduced much of Gaza to rubble. The Oct. 7 attack killed about 1,200 people and saw 250 dragged back into Gaza as hostages, according to the Israeli government. But months of negotiations mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar have failed to deliver a cease-fire and hostage-release deal. Meanwhile, fewer than half the hostages have returned to Israel alive, while the war has given rise to starvation and disease throughout the enclave.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s campaign, declined to answer questions about Boulos and his work on behalf of the former president’s reelection bid, or about any aspirations the campaign may have for winning votes from Arabs and Muslims. But she said Trump is committed to peace in the Middle East.

“President Trump wants peace and prosperity for all people,” Leavitt wrote in an email, emphasizing a pair of normalization treaties Israel signed with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain during his administration. “President Trump will once again deliver peace through strength to rebuild and expand the peace coalition he built in his first term to create long-term safety and security for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

In Phoenix, a few dozen men and women, mostly of Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian descent, had gathered in the sprawling foyer of Bishara Bahbah’s home, where the furniture and a grand piano had been shoved aside to make way for two large dining tables, and where Boulos spoke facing a large artistic rendering of Jerusalem’s Old City — claimed by Israelis and Palestinians — on the opposite wall. Bahbah invited a Washington Post reporter to observe the event.

A Palestinian American who recently retired from a career in financial services, Bahbah is the founder of Arab Americans for Trump. He had joined Boulos during a similar event in Michigan, and invited him here to address this group of mostly friends and family. Also in attendance was Abe Hamadeh, the one Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for Congress who is both Arab and Muslim — and expected to win in a reliably Republican district.

Boulos urged those gathered to consider the values they as “Middle Easterners” share with the Republican Party. “We are conservative by nature,” he told them.

But he centered his argument for Trump around the major issue he knew was on everyone’s mind, even though it’s one Trump himself has barely mentioned on the campaign trail: the bloodshed in Gaza. “Those massacres would not have happened if there was a strong president at the White House,” he postulated. “The entire war wouldn’t have happened.”

“I know there have been a lot of questions and this and that about certain statements,” he continued, vaguely alluding to Trump’s derogatory branding of a political opponent as a “Palestinian,” and his pledges to deport pro-Palestinian demonstrators. But Trump’s “clear and unequivocal position on this is that he is totally and absolutely against this war. … And he’s totally and absolutely against the killing of civilians.”

Trump’s public references to Israel and the Palestinians have been broad and contradictory, leaving room for interpretation. At times he has appeared to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and urge an end to the war, statements Boulos emphasizes during these events. “I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it,” the former president told a conservative radio host in the spring, describing footage of the Gaza bombardment as “heinous” and warning that Israel was “losing the PR war.”

At other points, Trump has cast himself as more pro-Israel than even Jewish Democrats. “Nobody did for Israel what I did for Israel, including defense, including billions and billions of dollars a year, $4 billion a year for years, when other people wanted to cut it off,” he told Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom this year.

His social media post depicting Muslim men as “your new neighbors” under a Harris administration came hours after news broke that Hamas had killed six Israeli hostages.

“Every U.S. president will support Israel,” said Wadih Daher, a California-based businessman and a member of Arab Americans for Trump, who had flown to Phoenix for the meeting at Bahbah’s house. Trump will do the same, Daher said. But while the Biden administration has waffled on whether to criticize or facilitate Israel, Trump, he believes, will make the war stop.

“Trump is a dealmaker. He is a businessman,” Daher said. “He will get a deal on the table and make a deal.”

Boulos, tall and bespectacled and clad in a dark suit, was in sympathetic company that night in Phoenix. All of those gathered in Bahbah’s home were furious at the Biden administration’s handling of the conflict, and most already leaned Republican. Even so, there was skepticism.

One man asked whether since-retracted media reports were true — that Trump told Netanyahu not to agree to a peace deal before the U.S. election. “The exact opposite,” Boulos responded.

“The problem,” ventured another man seated across the table, is that neither candidate really cares about Palestinians. “Unfortunately,” the only people to condemn what is happening in Gaza have been Democrats, he added, referring to liberals’ condemnation of the heavy bombardment, and the blockade-fueled starvation and disease, that have killed thousands of Palestinian children.

“I haven’t heard a single Republican stand up and say, ‘This is wrong,’” the man said.

“He said it,” Boulos insisted of Trump. “He said, ‘This war must end.’”

An anger not to be underestimated

A quarter-century ago, most Arab and Muslim Americans voted Republican, according to polling by the Washington-based Arab American Institute (AAI) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). If Trump were to lure them back, it would be a major electoral coup.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when President George W. Bush launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and innocent Muslims and Arabs were caught in the often discriminatory dragnet of his “war on terror,” many of those who historically had voted with the GOP chose to switch sides. Trump’s decision, days after taking office in 2017, to ban entry into the United States to the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries further solidified the Democrats’ appeal.

But the anger over Gaza is not to be underestimated, activists say.

Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the uncommitted movement and a longtime Democratic operative in Michigan, said he has spoken to “community members who’ve voted for Democrats their whole lives, who are saying they can no longer support the party or its candidates.”

“I think the party has a bigger problem on their hands than it cares to acknowledge,” he said.

The extent to which the votes of Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, in response to Gaza, may affect November’s election remains a gaping unknown.

A Pew Research Center poll released in March found that 60 percent of Muslim Americans believe Biden has favored the Israelis “too much,” with just 6 percent saying he’s struck “the right balance” in his management of the conflict. Other surveys are far too limited in their scope and methodology to offer clear or conclusive insight about the views of Arab and Muslim voters, though at least one showed Biden trailing Trump decisively in four key states — Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia — before he dropped out of the race in July.

There has been no such polling since Harris became the party’s nominee several weeks ago, though observers note that far fewer pro-Palestinian demonstrators showed up at the Democratic National Convention than activists had been predicted.

Usama Shami, president of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, Arizona’s largest Muslim congregation, said most people there abhor Trump. But Shami, who said he consistently votes Democratic, acknowledged feeling so disgusted by Biden’s handling of the war that — like many others — he didn’t bother to vote in the primary, a largely symbolic gesture at the time, as Biden faced no serious opposition for his party’s nomination.

“It was the first time in my life I didn’t vote,” he said. “Because of Gaza and Biden.”

‘The pain and betrayal’

According to AAI, Arizona ranks 14th among the states for the size of its Arab population, with a majority clustered in the Phoenix metro area. The organization estimates, based on census data, that there are about 61,626 Arab Americans of voting age living there — more than five times the vote margin of Biden’s 2020 win in the state.

After the Democratic Party last month rejected the uncommitted movement’s request for a Palestinian American to speak from the main stage at the Democratic National Convention, some Arab and Muslim political activists came away frustrated but committed to voting for Harris anyway.

“I’m not going to waste my vote,” Shami said.

Others feel less conciliatory.

“I’m spending a lot of my time talking to Arab and Muslim American community members about the dangers of Donald Trump,” Alawieh said. “But the pain and betrayal” they feel from the “administration’s unconditional support of weapons for Netanyahu run so deep that warnings about Trump oftentimes do not resonate. Many folks don’t believe that Trump would be worse on this issue. A common sentiment is, what could be worse than genocide?” he added.

Israel has strongly denied allegations, leveled by international human rights groups and the International Criminal Court at The Hague, that it has deliberately targeted civilians and used starvation as a method of warfare during its 11-month war in Gaza. The Israeli government has pointed repeatedly to Hamas’s practice of staging military operations from within Gaza’s dense civilian areas.

Two days after Boulos addressed the group at Bahbah’s house in Phoenix, Trump spoke to thousands at a rally in neighboring Glendale, Ariz. One man stood in the audience, close to the stage, wearing a shirt that read “Palestine for Trump.”

The former president made no mention of Israel or the Palestinians during his speech, although he alluded briefly to his distaste for foreign wars “that never end,” saying, “We don’t even know who the hell the country is that we’re fighting.”

It was unclear if he was talking about the conflict in the Middle East or in Ukraine — where he has vowed to withdraw U.S. support — or someplace else entirely.

Midway through the speech, a man stood near the back of the stadium. “President Trump! President Trump!” the man shouted, raising his hand in an attempt to get Trump’s attention. “I am from Iraq, and I support you! And I’m going to vote for you!”

“Shut up!” another man yelled.

Trump, at the opposite end of the stadium, never heard them.

Razzan Nakhlawi in Washington contributed to this report.

As the hardworking child of academically focused parents, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dreamed of reaching the highest levels of the legal profession. She even wrote in her college application to Harvard about becoming the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

But when the Biden administration called in 2022 with news that she was being vetted for that exact role, Jackson hesitated. She worried about the harsh spotlight on her family and the potential impact on her older daughter, Talia, who is on the autism spectrum.

Jackson and her equally driven type-A husband had initially struggled to grasp their child’s neurological differences, and Jackson wanted to be sure her daughter was comfortable with the possibility of the diagnosis becoming public.

“They had not asked for their lives to be raked over, simply because their mother dreamed of entering a realm where no one with her background and experiences had ever been before,” Jackson, 53, writes in her new memoir, “Lovely One.” Both Jackson’s daughters and her husband encouraged her to pursue her dream.

The story of Talia Jackson’s diagnosis was not widely known until now and is one of the biggest revelations in Jackson’s highly personal memoir, published this week. The book does not touch on the current cases or controversies before the Supreme Court, where Jackson is one of three liberals on a bench with a conservative supermajority that has dramatically shifted the law to the right in recent years.

Nor does Jackson write about the oral arguments in which she has become known for her extensive questioning, or her sharp separate dissents, including when the court majority in July granted Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution for official acts. She spends just four of nearly 400 pages on the grueling Senate hearings ahead of her confirmation in April 2022, when she was narrowly confirmed despite Republican efforts to paint her as a left-wing lower-court judge who coddled criminals and terrorists.

Instead, Jackson reflects on her groundbreaking path and the impact of key experiences, including her mentors, her uncle’s incarceration and the pain of being overlooked as a Black woman in the corporate legal world despite her sterling résumé.

“No one arrives at the highest of heights on their own, and there were lots of contributing factors — people, circumstances — that prepared me for this job, and I thought that needed to be recognized,” Jackson said in an interview Wednesday night before a book talk.

Jackson received an $893,750 advance from Penguin Random House for the book, according to her financial disclosure report. She is one of at least four Supreme Court justices — the others are Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — with forthcoming or just-published books about their lives and the law.

The justice has embarked on an extensive media tour, speaking with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show” this week and giving more than a dozen book talks this month, including in California, Illinois, Seattle and Florida, ahead of the court’s new term that begins in October. At the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, an audience of nearly 2,000 people gave her a lengthy standing ovation, with many participants clutching copies of her book.

Jackson says she was compelled to tell her story because of intense public interest in her nomination. She shares the reality of her balancing act as a working parent and partner to her husband, Patrick Jackson, a prominent surgeon, recalling quick naps she took in a grocery store parking lot on her way home from work years ago when she was seven months pregnant with their second child. And she details what it took to rise through the ranks of the legal profession, especially “as a woman of color with an unusual name.”

Even though Jackson had graduated with top honors from Harvard Law School and worked for three federal judges, she says, there were instances during her stints at corporate law firms when she felt her views were ignored at meetings — even though she was the only one in the room who had clerked at the Supreme Court.

More than once, Jackson writes, she would be standing near the copy machine or waiting for an elevator only to have an older law partner walk up and, assuming she was a secretary, ask which of his colleagues she assisted.

Such encounters, she writes, “reinforced for me that due respect for my talent, intellect, and legal abilities would not be automatically extended in some private-sector settings.” She recalls wanting to yank her two Harvard degrees off the wall to carry around with her.

Jackson first learned about the inner workings of the Supreme Court while clerking for the man she would eventually replace on the bench. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who retired in 2022, was constantly on the move, she writes, leaving his chambers to talk with and try to persuade other justices on various issues.

In the interview, Jackson said she finds herself thinking about how Breyer might have handled areas of disagreement among the current justices — who, unlike trial judges, must hash out their decisions together. He has told her that it takes time to acclimate to the ways of the court and encouraged her to build bonds by eating lunch with her colleagues.

“Collective decision-making is really a challenge. I think it’s been, not an easy transition from when I was my own person in the courtroom,” Jackson said, referring to her eight years as a judge in D.C. federal court. The steepest learning curve, she said, is “trying to deal with incorporating other people’s thoughts and ideas and getting their feedback. And how did how do you manage that in terms of what you would like to say and what they’re saying. That’s hard.”

Jackson is a prolific writer, tied with Justice Clarence Thomas for the most overall opinions in the last term and often writing a separate dissent or concurring opinion. She said that it’s not easy to figure out when to go it alone but that she thinks it is important to do so in some instances. “I want people to know what’s going on in the court and I want people to appreciate the issues,” she said. “And if we have differences of opinion, I think it’s fine to have people understand that and see what the different ideas are.”

The title of Jackson’s book is a reference to her given name — Ketanji Onyika. It translates to “lovely one,” and was chosen by her parents from a list sent to them by Jackson’s aunt, then a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa.

The memoir traces the backgrounds of her grandparents, who had only grade school educations, and her parents, who went to racially segregated schools and were the first in their families to go to college. Jackson contrasts their stories with the history of her husband’s Boston Brahmin family, whose ancestors include King Edward I of England, four Mayflower passengers and a signer of the U.S. Constitution.

Jackson’s parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, began their careers as teachers and had high expectations for their firstborn. They filled her bedroom with encyclopedias, atlases, and magazines with stories of famous African Americans. That was where Jackson first read in detail about Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to argue at the Supreme Court and serve on the federal bench. Motley shared a birthday with Jackson and, the justice writes, inspired her childhood dreams.

Coached by her grandmother and parents, Jackson learned not to dwell on encounters with racism in her predominantly White world in Miami, and to revel in her success as a class president and a champion public speaker on the high school debate circuit.

“I came to enjoy catching people off guard, disarming their conscious or unconscious stereotypes about Black people with my intelligence, articulation, preparation and ability to function well in a world that I knew expected me to fail,” she writes.

In tracing her career through the legal profession, Jackson writes for the first time about the life sentence her uncle received for a nonviolent drug offense. Jackson was a federal public defender in D.C. when Thomas Brown Jr., her father’s brother, called from a Florida prison asking his niece for help in seeking leniency — an episode first reported by The Washington Post when she was under consideration to become a justice.

“My heart raced and my hands shook as I sifted through the files, and my brow felt clammy as I studied each sheet of paper,” Jackson writes of reviewing Brown’s case files. “The tiny pilot flame of hope that I had nursed since I’d spoken with my uncle slowly bloomed into righteous anger — then died — as I realized that there was nothing in the files that either justified a life sentence or warranted a retrial or a resentencing in his case.”

After a referral from Jackson, a private law firm eventually took her uncle’s case pro bono, and President Barack Obama years later commuted his sentence. He was released in 2017. The case brought questions of sentencing policy and fundamental fairness into sharp relief for the young public defender.

“It’s one thing to read about cases and their outcomes,” she writes, “but I now had firsthand experience of the myriad ways in which criminal justice policy can destroy the lives and livelihoods of real human beings.”

The book also details her courtship and marriage to Patrick Jackson, whom she met in history class at Harvard, and the initial concerns expressed by their friends and families about their interracial relationship. Eventually, Jackson writes, the couple’s loved ones fully embraced them.

But perhaps the biggest challenge they faced was the struggle to understand their older daughter’s troubles in school.

“Unfortunately for Talia, her well-meaning, utterly devoted parents had some blind spots, likely stemming from a heightened work ethic that Patrick and I had internalized to an almost ridiculous degree,” Jackson writes.

“We took far too long to understand that Talia wasn’t neurologically wired like Patrick or me, and although she was indeed extraordinarily bright, we couldn’t simply parent her as we ourselves had been parented.”

Talia’s diagnosis with autism — in 2012, when she was 11 — was devastating, but also a relief, Jackson writes: “We could at last accept that her life was likely to be fundamentally different from the one we had envisioned for her when she was a newborn.”

The memoir includes some lighter moments as well, following Jackson as she shops in New York’s Garment District for her first judicial robes after her 2013 confirmation to the U.S. District Court in D.C., and recounting the day she discovered her signature hairstyle — tightly coiled sisterlocks.

Even in the glare of public life after her Supreme Court nomination, Jackson writes, her low-maintenance, chin-length locs “freed me to show up in the most formal legal settings wearing a neat, precise style that I love and one that also communicates my appreciation for my God-given hair texture.”