“Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign told a Pennsylvania court that he will be endorsing former President Donald Trump, ahead of his own Friday afternoon announcement putting to rest a tumultuous independent presidential campaign,” NBC News reports.

“The filing in Pennsylvania, in a lawsuit related to a legal challenge to his own ballot access in the state, said that Kennedy was withdrawing from the ballot ‘as a result of today’s endorsement of Donald Trump for the office of President of the United States.'”

Remember when Kennedy was a “radical left liberal” and “plant” who was “put in place” to help Democrats?

“A dozen Republican White House lawyers who served in the administrations of then-Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in her race against GOP nominee former President Donald Trump,” Fox News reports.

Molly Ball: “Harris’s banner address to the nation at the conclusion of this week’s Democratic convention was a bracingly normal, workmanlike political speech, one intended to communicate not shattering emotion but earthly gravitas. There were notes of optimism and paeans to the middle class, invocations of timeless ordeals and attacks on extremism.”

“A traditional appeal intended to communicate steadiness and trust, delivered evenly before a courtroom-like backdrop of wood paneling and American flags. There were few moments of poetry, just a 59-year-old woman telling a curious nation where she came from and what she hopes to achieve: simple, relatable, without celebrity or glitz.”

The FiveThirtyEight forecast model was relaunched and finds Kamala Harris currently has a 58% chance to win the presidency.

Jonathan Chait: “After Donald Trump’s surprising win in 2016, the Democratic Party was panicked into abandoning the Obama model as a failure. Earlier this month, I examined Kamala Harris’s political challenge through the lens of Obamaism. Could Harris rediscover a winning formula her party had discarded? The convention gives us a clear answer: Yes. She. Can.”

“The Obama recipe has several key components, all of which were vividly present in Chicago. The most obvious may be novelty. Obama promised to turn the page, leaving behind frustrating and tiresome debates of the past, rather than overpowering the Democrats’ adversaries.”

“The convention, accordingly, presented Harris to the country as if she was an outsider. Speaker after speaker hammered this theme.”

“Donald Trump’s busiest week on the campaign trail collided with Kamala Harris’ most politically significant moment, a deliberate move by the Republican nominee to cede as little limelight as possible to his opponent,” Bloomberg reports.

“As ebullient Democrats convened in Chicago for their party’s nominating convention, Trump has spent the week trying to energize his own campaign, with an aggressive schedule taking him to five swing states in as many days, a stop at the US-Mexico border and interviews with major news outlets. That’s a marked shift for the former president, who has previously scheduled one or two public events a week.”

“The frantically arranged week belies Trump’s concerns that he’s lost the ability to drive the news cycle as he did when President Joe Biden, 81, was still running for reelection.”

Jonathan Last: “Consider the following: Democrats featured Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton—that’s all but one of the living Democratic presidential nominees going back to 1992.”

“The Republican convention featured no former presidential nominees. The state of the Republican party is so toxic that previous nominees—even previous presidents—have been unpersoned and read out of the movement.”

“That’s a portrait of two institutions: One institution in harmony with its legacy and continuing to evolve in such a way as to hold its coalition together. The other institution in a state of convulsion.”

William Kristol: “Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech last night was a success. It capped a Democratic convention that was a success. That convention, in turn, capped Harris’s first month as a candidate, which was a success.”

“All that success was by no means inevitable.”

“One really has to tip one’s hat to the vice president and her campaign, and say: Not bad. Not bad at all. Pretty damn impressive, in fact…”

“But enough of all this unaccustomed good cheer. We need to start worrying about the debate. It’s only two-and-a-half weeks away.”

“The U.S. Secret Service has placed multiple agents on leave, including the head of the Pittsburgh field office, as a result of its investigation into last month’s assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump,” CBS News reports.

Donald Trump’s campaign announced that there would be a “special guest” at his rally in Glendale, Ariz., on Friday, the New York Times reports.

The expectation is that it’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is ending his independent presidential bid later today in Arizona.

Josh Marshall: “The most telling comments were those from Republican commentators who couldn’t find their way around saying that it was a strong speech before, of course, reassuring listeners that Harris is obviously terrible and they agree with her about nothing.”

John Harwood: “Trump has taken Republicans so far off the deep end as to leave the American mainstream wide open Harris and Democrats spent this effective convention claiming it – on broadly-shared values, on decency, on love of country.”

CNN: “Though his odds of victory were quickly diminishing – a recent CBS News poll measured his support at just 2% – Kennedy’s decision to bow out 74 days before the election nevertheless presents another twist to a race already unlike any other. And amid a momentum shift that has catapulted the newly installed Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, into close contention with Trump, there is hope within the former president’s operation that Kennedy’s exit could prove decisive if certain battlegrounds are decided by thousands of ballots, just as they were in 2020.”

“It’s hardly certain what Kennedy’s backers will do. Whether many of them ever intended to vote for him or at all is difficult to gauge, and some may choose to sit the election out without an alternative on the ballot.”

Peter Baker: “Joy cometh in the morning, but so do hangovers. The party in Chicago is done, the confetti has been swept up, the pictures have been posted to social media. But the real question as exuberant Democrats woke up on Friday was whether they could channel the sheer intoxication of the United Center into a sustained, 74-day sprint to Election Day.”

“Vice President Kamala Harris emerged from her nominating convention with a burst of momentum that Democrats hardly expected barely a month ago, when they thought they would be tethered to a possibly doomed re-election bid by President Biden. She has rejuvenated a once demoralized party and given a jolt of optimism to Democrats who now see victory in reach.”

“The buzzkill reality, however, is that victory is anything but assured. The thousands of jubilant delegates in the hall this week were not representative of the swing voters that Ms. Harris needs to defeat former President Donald J. Trump. History is littered with presidential candidates who roused their partisans at conventions only to fall short come November. And whatever else he is, Mr. Trump is no pushover. Ms. Harris can expect a bruising battle over the next two and a half months.”