The Morning Dispatch: Trump Hammers Home ‘Law and Order’ Messaging in Address

Happy Friday! “For eight days the political parties held conventions, but on the ninth day, your Morning Dispatchers rested, and were refreshed.” (Exodus 31:17)

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 42,168 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 5.6 percent of the 752,177 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,119 deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 180,814.

• At least six people have died—including a 14-year-old girl—and more than 910,000 homes are without power after Hurricane Laura ripped across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas early Thursday morning. Laura has since weakened to a tropical depression.

• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will resign from his post due to ill health, according to the country’s national broadcaster, NHK. Abe had served in the role for nearly eight years, the longest run in Japanese history.

• The Trump administration announced it would be buying 150 million rapid COVID-19 antigen tests from Abbott Laboratories for $750 million.

• Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell announced a “robust updating” of the banking system’s inflationary target, permitting inflation to run higher than the Fed’s standard 2 percent goal.

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters she and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows remain at a “tragic impasse” over coronavirus aid legislation, despite the pair speaking on the phone recently in an effort to restart talks.

• NBA players met on Thursday morning and voted to resume the playoffs, likely beginning this weekend. The league had postponed Wednesday and Thursday’s games after the Milwaukee Bucks players boycotted Game 5 of their series against the Orlando Magic to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha.

Conventional Wisdom

Accepting the Republican nomination for president in Cleveland four years ago, then-candidate Donald Trump made a promise to the nation in front of a packed Quicken Loans Arena. “Americans watching this address tonight have seen the recent images of violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities. Many have witnessed this violence personally, some have even been its victims,” he said. “I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon—and I mean very soon—come to an end. Beginning on January 20 of 2017, safety will be restored.”

Last night—1,316* days into his first term—Trump stood in front of a revamped White House and about 1,500 closely packed, mostly unmasked guests to accept the GOP’s nomination a second time: “We can never have a situation where things are going on as they are today,” he said. “There’s violence and danger in the streets of many Democrat-run cities throughout America.” (Including Washington, D.C.—videos late last night depicted protesters outside the White House harassing many of the speech’s attendees, including Sen. Rand Paul, as they left the premises.)

With Sunday’s police shooting of Jacob Blake rekindling the riots and looting that have plagued many cities for months, President Trump and his allies spent much of Thursday hammering this law-and-order message, warning of the chaos they believe will reign if Joe Biden is elected in November. 

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s prepared remarks referred to Biden as a “Trojan Horse with Bernie, AOC, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter and his party’s entire Left Wing hidden inside his body just waiting to execute their pro-criminal, anti-police policies.” 

“The hard truth,” Vice President Mike Pence said on Wednesday, “is you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

Biden responded to this latter attack in an interview with Andrea Mitchell on Thursday. “The problem we have right now, is we’re in Donald Trump’s America,” he argued. “He’s rooting for more violence, not less. … He’s kept pouring gasoline on the fire.”

In an interview with Peter Hamby this week, Sen. Lindsey Graham said he advised Trump to broaden his message beyond what he’s against. “There is a case to be made for Donald Trump apart from being afraid of Joe Biden. I want to hear the case for Donald Trump,” Graham said. “I understand the fear of the radical left, but it’s now time for us to hear from Donald Trump the case for his reelection, what he has done, and what he can do. I hope that’s what he will do Thursday with an optimistic tone.”

Trump’s speech on Thursday was long—70 minutes, compared to Biden’s 25 last week—affording him ample time to do both. “We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years,” Trump said, in one of his more than 40 mentions of the former vice president by name. “This election will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”

But sticking to the dual teleprompters on either side of his podium, Trump also rattled off myriad policy priorities from the past four years—the USMCA trade deal, cracking down on illegal immigration, lowering the cost of prescription drugs, taking out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Qassem Solemeini—and made his pitch for why he deserves four more. “In a new term as president, we will again build the greatest economy in history, quickly returning to full employment, soaring incomes and record prosperity,” he said. “We will defend America against all threats and protect America against all dangers. … We will rekindle new faith in our values, new pride in our history and a new spirit of unity that can only be realized through love for our great country.”

With both parties’ conventions over and done with, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for Trump to make up his 8.5-point deficit against Biden in national polling; the only things separating us from the election are three scheduled presidential debates (and one vice presidential one), and hundreds of millions of dollars in political advertising over the next 67 days. 

The renewed violence in cities across the country may provide an opening for the Trump campaign to win back some of the suburban moderate voters it has bled in recent months. Kellyanne Conway sure seems to think so, telling Fox News that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety, and law and order.” But chaos, anarchy, vandalism, and violence have reigned in some cities for much of the summer, and Joe Biden’s lead has remained steady—or even grown.

Hurricane Laura Barrels Through Louisiana

Hurricane Laura reached the Louisiana coastline at 1 a.m. Thursday morning, clocking in as one of the strongest storms to ever hit the Gulf Coast. The storm made landfall overnight as a Category 4 hurricane in the Lake Charles region, and was downgraded to Category 2 as it moved inland Thursday morning. “Tropical storm force winds, especially in gusts, will continue near the center of Laura over portions of extreme northern Louisiana and Arkansas this evening,” the National Hurricane Center warned yesterday at 4 p.m. 

Six deaths have been attributed to the storm thus far, all of which occurred in Louisiana. Four of those deaths, according to Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, were reportedly caused by falling trees. “It is clear that we did not sustain and suffer the absolute catastrophic damage that we thought was likely,” Edwards said Thursday afternoon. “But we have sustained a tremendous amount of damage.”

On-the-ground news coverage in Louisiana reported a sea of downed telephone poles, roofless homes, and debris-ridden trailer parks, ransacked by the storm’s winds. A fire broke out at a BioLab chemical plant in Westlake, Louisiana, on Thursday morning, leading authorities to issue shelter-in-place orders in the surrounding region. According to PowerOutage.us, more than 860,000 customers were without power in Louisiana and Texas Thursday evening.

Hurricane Laura did not hit Texas quite as hard as state authorities expected. “The storm surge and the powerful winds could have led to catastrophic deaths,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told CNN Thursday morning. “We no doubt saved lives because of those evacuations.” The governor added that search and rescue teams were deployed in Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange Counties, looking for people in need of help. No fatalities have been linked to the storm in Texas thus far. 

President Trump announced on Thursday he plans to visit Louisiana and Texas this weekend. “Now it turned out we got a little bit lucky,” he said. “It was very big and it was very powerful, but it passed quickly.”

Hurricane Laura is tied with Last Island—an 1856 storm—for the strongest hurricane on record to ever make landfall in Louisiana, according to Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach. “If you’re looking at maximum winds, Laura was technically stronger than Katrina.” 

But Klotzbach clarified that Katrina was stronger if you analyze both storms from a pressure perspective. “The pressure is more of an integrated metric of not just how strong the winds are, but also how large the storm is. And larger storms tend to have more storm surge,” he said. “Any way you slice it, this is a really, really bad, really, really powerful hurricane.”

The Lake Charles region was hit the hardest by the storm, but other parishes across Louisiana experienced the hurricane’s ripple effects as Laura moved inland. “Yesterday we were just getting tornado warnings left and right,” said Genevieve Bourgeois, a student at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who evacuated to Oxford, Mississippi. “So far we’ve just gotten some rain and 30-to-50 mile per hour winds, but I do expect my apartment [in Baton Rouge] to flood, and we’re expecting to get some storm surge as well.”

“I think authorities have taken a much better control over this than Katrina,” she added.

Some New Orleans residents prepared for a storm that ultimately did not hit the city as hard as many state officials anticipated. “I stocked up on water and nonperishables that would last me in case we did get shut down,” said Sara Koopman, a student at Tulane University. “When I went to Walgreens, half of Tulane was there buying all of the water that they could.” She said there was no school-wide evacuation, but Tulane did provide students with hurricane relief food before the storm hit the coast.

The Fed Stops Worrying and Learns to Love Inflation 

Saying that “a robust job market can be sustained without causing an outbreak in inflation,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Thursday announced a policy shift away from suppressing inflation and toward boosting the labor market. The move signals the end of decades of economic orthodoxy, which argued the Federal Reserve must aggressively intervene in strong labor markets to avoid runaway inflation.

Instead, the Fed will lean in more to the first part of what is termed its “dual mandate” from Congress: “Promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long term interest rates.” In a revised statement on Thursday, the Open Market Committee of the Fed’s Board of Governors said “the Committee seeks over time to mitigate shortfalls of employment from the Committee’s assessment of its maximum level.”

In an interview with The Dispatch, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office, noted that the move represented a shift in economic thinking toward looser monetary policy. Persistently low inflation in the American economy since the 2008 recession has convinced the Fed that “you can push harder on unemployment” without raising as many worries about inflation, he noted.

Holtz-Eakin said the tight link between high inflation and low unemployment, a widely held view among economists in the latter half of the 20th century, has been broken somewhat in recent years. The precise reasons why are something of a mystery, but Holtz-Eakin noted that service inflation and goods inflation diverged after 2008, with the former growing at a much quicker pace, indicating that globalized supply chains work to suppress price increases.

Jason Furman, the former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in an email the Federal Reserve’s new strategy “is unambiguously an improvement,” noting that “the Federal Reserve has clearly recognized that the traditional relationship between unemployment and inflation has not been operative.”

Furman also noted the Fed’s new targeting of average inflation rather than a strict 2 percent goal—allowing it to rise above 2 percent for periods of time—was also a meaningful shift. He said the move was in some ways a formalization of existing practice, adding that “one could also debate whether the updated strategies go far enough. I still think serious consideration should be given to raising the inflation goal and possibly even to more radical ideas like nominal GDP targeting.”

Holtz-Eakin, however, argued there were tradeoffs to the new strategy. Not only will keeping interest rates low now take away one of the Fed’s main tools for fighting future recessions, he said, but low interest rate policies will fuel higher asset prices, running the risk of another financial crisis like 2000 or 2008. Holtz-Eakin also emphasized that the move “doesn’t have any practical impacts this year”—it will become significant a few years down the line, when the Fed will have to decide whether to hike interest rates or not.

But as the nation kicks off the 2020s in recovery from a severe, virus-induced recession, the Fed has signaled that its strategy will not simply be a rerun of the last decade. 

Worth Your Time

• This New York Times visual investigation of the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting in Kenosha is the best breakdown we’ve seen of what transpired the other night. Eight reporters worked to piece together available video snippets and weave a cohesive narrative out of the chaos of the night. “Footage shows Mr. Rittenhouse being chased by an unknown group of people into the parking lot of another dealership several blocks away,” they write. “While Mr. Rittenhouse is being pursued by the group, an unknown gunman fires into the air, though it’s unclear why. The weapon’s muzzle flash appears in footage filmed at the scene. Mr. Rittenhouse turns toward the sound of gunfire as another pursuer lunges toward him from the same direction. Mr. Rittenhouse then fires four times, and appears to shoot the man in the head.”

• We referenced it briefly above, but the whole Peter Hamby interview of Sen. Lindsey Graham is worth a read. Hamby asks Graham about TikTok, conspiracy theorists (“QAnon is batshit crazy”), how he went from calling Trump a “xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot” to being one of his biggest supporters in the Senate, and why he thinks his race in South Carolina this year is so close.

• In a piece for Commentary, Dylan Rothman endeavors to answer the nagging question: “Are people lying about being woke?” Drawing on Duke University Economist Timur Kuran’s 1995 concept of “preference falsification,” Rothman explains how discrepancies between publicly held and privately held beliefs tend to make true public opinion hard to gauge. As long as certain convictions are deemed socially unacceptable, public discourse will remain “economically and socially inefficient,” Rothman argues, as fearful individuals self-censor important ideas and information. “If the American media had learned anything from the last election, it would make an effort to allow the airing of these views in public without overbearing stigma, the better to debate them openly.”

Something Powerful

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Toeing the Company Line

• Grizzly Adams, er, Jonah — is back from the wilderness and ready to share his thoughts on the RNC, Jeff Bezos, and the “Biden is a vessel for radicals” theory. Tune in for a Ruminant-style Remnant to listen to his solo musings.

• At the site today, Andrew has a new piece breaking down the CDC’s latest head-scratching decision to stop recommending that all people who have come into contact with COVID be tested. Bottom line: We don’t know for a fact it was a politically motivated decision, but public health experts tell us it’s hard to think of any other reason there could have been. 

• This week, Alec dispelled false accusations of Joe Biden’s blind eye to violent protests and looting in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Despite rhetoric from Tucker Carlson and Sen. Josh Hawley about Biden’s support for “the Marxist left,” the Democratic presidential candidate has actually denounced arson and destruction in American cities, and more than once. Check out the latest Dispatch Fact Check for a rundown. 

• On yesterday’s Advisory Opinions, Sarah and David dive into some of the legal ambiguities surrounding the alleged shootings by Kyle Rittenhouse amid riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “We’re never talking about black and white cases but then everyone treats them like they’re black and white cases,” Sarah notes. Our hosts also cover Bush v. Gore and TikTok’s lawsuit against the Trump administration.

Let Us Know

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Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), James Sutton (@jamespsuttonsf), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Correction, August 28, 2020: This newsletter originally miscalculated the number of days since President Trump’s inauguration in 2017.