It was a banner 12 hours for the American political right, the likes of which we’ve rarely seen in recent years.

But how good was it for them — and bad for the left?

To recap, Biden’s debate performance immediately led to significant fretting on the left about his ability to carry the torch forward, even leading some to float replacing him on the ballot at August’s Democratic National Convention. That was followed by the Supreme Court on Friday morning: 1) delivering a significant setback to the government’s prosecutions of Donald Trump allies over the Jan. 6 insurrection, and 2) delivering conservatives a long-awaited win overturning crucial four-decade-old precedent in the Chevron vs. Natural Resources Defense Council case.

The final event might actually be the most significant and long-lasting. The Supreme Court overturned a 1984 precedent that said courts should largely defer to federal agency officials in interpreting laws. That sounds technical and obscure, but the ruling could be massive. It could severely hamper the ability of the government to do things like combat climate change and regulate big business, shrinking the role of government and experts in American life.

The impact of the Jan. 6 decision is more nuanced, but it’s significant both practically and politically. Basically, the court ruled that the government used a federal law — obstructing or impeding an official proceeding — too broadly in charging a Jan. 6 defendant. That same law has been used against hundreds of other Jan. 6 defendants, including Trump himself.

The Justice Department quickly sought to downplay the ruling. It noted that 82 percent of more than 1,400 Jan. 6 defendants weren’t charged with or haven’t been convicted of that particular crime. It also noted that just 2 percent of those currently serving prison sentences were convicted of that crime and no other felony. The implication: This isn’t about to free a bunch of prisoners.

It could also have limited impact on Trump personally, given he’s charged with other Jan. 6-related offenses. But it’s still a massive headache with untold consequences.

Perhaps as significantly, though, it gave Trump rare, actual political ammunition in his years-long effort to downplay Jan. 6 and accuse the government of going too far in prosecuting him and his supporters.

Trump’s claims about the “weaponization” of the justice system and his proposal to pardon Jan. 6 defendants haven’t really caught on beyond his base. But it’s a decision he can use to make those cases, the former of which has largely rested on conspiracy theories and misleading claims. The Supreme Court effectively said the government has gone too far, at least in one case. And notably, the Supreme Court’s majority in the case included liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (though Jackson suggested the ruling shouldn’t spare too many Jan. 6 defendants from their charges).

That doesn’t mean Trump will be able to completely flip the script or anything close to it; these are complicated issues that won’t have much immediate fallout. But it’s certainly a foothold he didn’t have before.

The impact of Thursday night’s debate will come into focus more quickly as we get polling that gauges just how much damage Biden might have done to himself.

We’ve so far got limited data, including two snap polls showing about twice as many people said Trump won the debate as said Biden did. This includes CNN polling, which in 2020 had shown the opposite: Biden lapping Trump in those debates. The CNN poll also showed debate-watchers’ favorable views of Biden dropping by six points (to just 31 percent) and favorable views of Trump rising by three points (to 43 percent).

We’ll see what happens, but those are inauspicious early signs for a Democratic Party that had already been panicky about its 2024 chances. And the performance can’t help but drive home already-prevalent voter concerns about Biden’s age and mental sharpness; it was practically an hour-and-a-half-long advertisement for Republicans about what is arguably Biden’s biggest liability.

Should Biden’s polls indeed take a turn for the worse, it’s likely we’ll see an even more earnest discussion about turning the page on him. But that discussion itself would be fraught for the party.

Which means the blows could keep coming.

Tartt’s best-selling debut novel had recently come out in paperback, and it was my “vacation read” — more like “vacation immersion.” The eerie atmosphere of that novel so affected my mood that, forevermore, California redwoods have been conflated in my mind with the dark forest surrounding a small Vermont college where a fictional murder occurred.

This summer, I once again felt that all-too-rare sense of being completely possessed by a story as I read “The God of the Woods,” by Liz Moore. There are some superficial similarities between the two novels: Both are intricate narratives featuring young people isolated in enclosed worlds — in Tartt’s story, a small cohort of classics students at the aforementioned college (modeled on Bennington); in Moore’s, a summer camp within a vast forest in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. A sense of predetermined doom also pervades both books. But the most vital connection for me is the beguiling force of these two literary suspense novels. For those susceptible to its pull, “The God of the Woods,” like “The Secret History,” transports readers so deeply into its richly peopled, ominous world that, for hours, everything else falls away.

There’s more than a touch of Gothic excess about “The God of The Woods,” beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family have disappeared 14 years apart. When the novel opens in August 1975, an Emerson Camp counselor discovers that 13-year-old Barbara Van Laar is missing from her bunk. Barbara was conceived after the disappearance of her brother in 1961. Peter “Bear” Van Laar, a boy as playful and adventurous as his nickname, was 8 when he vanished from “Self-Reliance,” the Van Laar’s summer house that adjoins the camp. (The cosseted Van Laar family clearly has a weakness for referencing — if not internalizing — the do-it-yourself gospel of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.) The surrounding woods and nearby Lake Joan were searched exhaustively, but no trace of the beloved Bear was ever found. Coincidentally, at the time of both disappearances, a convicted serial killer was spotted traipsing around the area. This fiend, named Jacob Sluiter, informally known as “Slitter,” belongs to an old family who once owned the land holdings that became the Van Laar Preserve.

To summarize the plot of “The God of the Woods,” thusly, risks making this nuanced literary suspense novel sound like a campfire tale generated by AI. (A serial killer! Terrified campers lost in the woods!) Rather than a straightforward sensational yarn, Moore’s story jumps around non-sequentially from the 1950s through the 1970s and is crowded with characters: campers, counselors, the Van Laars and their tony houseguests, townspeople and local police. Throughout, Moore’s language is unflaggingly precise. Here’s her omniscient narrator describing a girl named Tracy, Barbara’s bunkmate, who suffers from low self-esteem. And, little wonder why:

“[Tracy’s] father once told her casually that she was built like a plum on toothpicks, and the phrase was at once so cruel and so poetic that it clicked into place around her like a harness.”

As wise as it is about the vulnerability of adolescence, “The God of the Woods” is also chillingly astute about the invisible boundaries demarcating social class. Take, for instance, the character of Judyta “Judy” Luptack, a 26-year-old woman from a working-class Polish American family who’s been newly promoted to “junior investigator” on the otherwise all-male police team searching for Barbara. Stationed inside the Van Laar mansion, Judy has the increasingly urgent need “to pee”:

“She’s not certain what procedure is. Nowhere in her training did she come across this exact scenario: What do you do if you’re in someone’s private home for hours and hours with no access to the outside world? Rich people especially. She doesn’t want to ask these people for anything. If she were a man, she’d [go] in the woods.”

Moore’s superb 2020 crime novel, “Long Bright River,” went deep into issues of addiction and entrenched poverty while exploring the opioid crisis in Philadelphia; “The God of the Woods” heads off into different territory — weird and uncanny — and yet, it too offers strong social criticism. As it unfolds, “The God of the Woods” becomes more and more focused on how its female characters break free — or don’t — of the constraints of their time and social class. Whatever the case, breaking free of the spell Moore casts is close to impossible.

Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.