‘Let’s Get Rid of Her’

Voters may punish Donald Trump at the polls this week. But he has already shattered the norms of political journalism.

Around 10am on August 21, a police sergeant responded to a call suggesting that a trespasser was refusing to leave a Republican event at the Hawk Pointe Golf Club in Washington, New Jersey. That morning, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was attending a fundraiser at Hawk Pointe with Thomas Kean Jr., the United States representative for New Jersey’s seventh congressional district, who is now up for reelection in a closely watched race. The officer thought he might have to pull someone out; he wondered whether to call for backup. But what he found surprised him. “What’s going on?” he asked Harrison Neely, a spokesman for Kean. “Basically what happened,” Neely said, according to police bodycam footage I watched of the incident, “is there’s a reporter who is not invited.”