Donald Trump’s criminal trial, soon to enter its fifth week, has felt like drawn-out foreplay. There have been moments of frisson. But as with any such encounter that stretches on and on, arousal waxes and wanes, prompting a few fateful questions. Where is this going? Hurry it up already? Ultimately, climax in this trial will depend on the testimony of one man: Michael Cohen, Mr Trump’s former lawyer. And he is not due on the witness stand for several days yet.

The campaign memoir is an American tradition with a few signature ingredients. These include a flattering headshot, a title superficially stirring but actually meaningless (see Kamala Harris’s “The Truths We Hold” or Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to Be Free”) and above all a text that is gently self-congratulatory and so insipid as to be entirely unmemorable. Kristi Noem, the telegenic Republican governor of South Dakota plainly angling to be Donald Trump’s running-mate, has released her own contribution to this grand literary tradition. It succeeds on only two of these three counts: the photo looks expensively posed (with a gilt clock and feminist placard in the foreground and an American flag in background), and the title (“No Going Back”) is suitably vapid. But the contents are unfortunately memorable in the worst possible ways.

Considering the recent pattern of American politics, the Republicans’ choice to hold their convention this July in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is no surprise. Barack Obama easily won the state twice, but in the other four presidential contests this century Wisconsin was decided by less than 1% of the vote. Hillary Clinton, who did not even campaign there in 2016 against Donald Trump, lost the state by 23,000 votes. In 2020 Joe Biden did not repeat her mistake. The Democrats planned their convention for Milwaukee, before covid-19 intervened, and in the end he carried the state, though by just 21,000 votes out of more than 3.2m. Wisconsin is among the handful of swing states this year.