Obama's Trump critique, RFK's Trump endorsement: What broke through for the media this week

Barack Obama was the star of the show at the DNC this week, another week where political content dominated the discourse thanks to the tail end of the convention in Chicago.

The other big news was RFK Jr. suspending his campaign and endorsing Donald Trump, though this got much more play in the conservative media ecosystem than it did in the mainstream. Let's look a little deeper.

Obama uses speech to mock Trump

In a prime speaking slot at the DNC, former president Obama made headlines for mocking his successor, in comments that overshadowed much of the rest of his speech.

The same minute-long excerpt analyzing his "weird obsession with crowd sizes" while looking suggestively down at his hands did numbers across a number of different news accounts, but MSNBC on TikTok and 纽约时报 on Instagram had the two that saw the most engagement.

Beyond Obama, families were a big theme of the top coverage of the DNC, with a video of Kamala Harris's nieces demonstrating how to pronounce her name alongside Kerry Washington the top post for MSNBC on TikTok and a photo of Tim Walz's son supporting his father from NPR seeing more than 350k engagements on Instagram

RFK Jr. drops out, leads cross-party endorsements

After a whirlwind presidential campaign, RFK Jr. suspended his campaign last week and endorsed former President Trump at a rally. This narrative was responsible for many of the most viral stories of the week, with reporting from the Daily Wire doing particularly well.

This did not happen in isolation — there has been a plethora of crossing party lines for endorsements this week, including Adam Kinzinger at the DNC and Tulsi Gabbard endorsing Trump.

Some stray links

• The German navy made it to London — the BBC News video of the ship floating down the Thames playing Star Wars music was one of the top pieces of news on Instagram this week
• Sky News shared a video of the world's second-largest diamond, recently unearthed in a diamond mine in Botswana. Commenters joked about the UK taking an interest in the country as a result
• Australia continues to Australia, as a News.com.au video showcased a python that had bitten a man from below as he sat on the toilet
• Gas prices are down! NPR's reporting on prices being headed towards 2021 lows was the top individual story of the week