Will the RFK Endorsement Move the Needle?

Happy Tuesday! We’re still taking applications for our Fall Podcast Internship! One perk of interning in the fall—in addition to avoiding the D.C. summers—is that our colleague James Scimecca can’t pressure you to play on the company softball team. (Though there are rumblings about a fall bowling league.) Check out the posting and apply today if you are interested!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Russia launched a massive air attack on Ukrainian territory early Monday morning, which Kyiv claimed included some 100 drones and 100 missiles and killed at least six people. In an appeal to the international community, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky requested support from European countries’ militaries to counter Russian air attacks. “Across Ukraine, we could do much more to protect lives if the aviation of our European neighbors operated in concert with our F-16s and air defense systems,” Zelensky tweeted shortly after the air assault. “If such unity has proven effective in the Middle East, it must work in Europe too. Life holds the same value everywhere.”
• A Chinese military surveillance aircraft violated Japanese airspace on Monday, prompting the Japanese government to scramble fighter planes and issue warnings to the Chinese aircraft. The airspace incursion lasted for only about two minutes, but Japanese media reported the Chinese violation—which occurred above territorial waters off Japan’s southern coast—was the first of its kind. 
• French authorities on Saturday arrested Pavel Durov, co-founder and CEO of the popular, privacy-focused messaging platform Telegram, shortly after he landed at an airport near Paris on his private plane. French police then extended his detention for up to 96 hours for questioning, pending a French judge’s decision to either prosecute or release him. The New York Times reported Monday that French prosecutors were investigating an unnamed person, potentially Durov, for alleged complicity in illegal activities—including the distribution of child pornography, drug and money laundering, and failure to cooperate with investigative authorities. “The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” French President Emmanuel Macron clarified on Monday after facing public backlash. “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
• Negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas held in Cairo reportedly made progress over the weekend and will continue this week. The talks included mediating representatives from the United States, Qatar, and Egypt, but representatives for Hamas refused direct communication with Israeli and U.S. officials. It’s unclear how the exchange of fire along Israel’s border with Lebanon over the weekend will affect the talks.
• Pakistani government officials reported Monday that insurgent militants killed 73 people—including civilians, soldiers, and law enforcement—in separate incidents across the country’s Balochistan region, including attacks targeting civilian highways, railroads, and police stations. The Baloch Liberation Army—a separatist group the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist organization—took responsibility for the attacks, claiming they targeted Pakistani military personnel disguised in civilian clothing. However, Pakistani officials reported 38 civilians were killed, including 23 at a highway security checkpoint in which those from the country’s Punjab region were specifically targeted. “These incidents of sabotage are a conspiracy to create instability in Pakistan,” the country’s interior ministry tweeted. “The enemy wants to create anarchy in the country under a well thought out plan.”
• More than 60 people were killed in Sudan on Monday following recent rain storms that caused a dam collapse in the country’s eastern region, followed by massive flooding. The Sudanese Armed Forces—a group currently battling the Rapid Support Forces in a civil war that has ravaged the civilian population for more than a year—governs much of the affected region and announced it would send assistance and organize support for victims in the area. 
• United Nations officials told news outlets on Monday that the body has paused humanitarian operations in Gaza, prompted by Israel’s new evacuation orders on Sunday in Deir Al-Balah, the central Gazan city where the international agency’s humanitarian efforts are headquartered. The officials maintained the humanitarian aid suspension is temporary and will resume once the agency finds a new location to base its operations.
• Special counsel Jack Smith filed a request on Monday asking a federal appeals court to reinstate his case against former President Donald Trump over his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Judge Aileen Cannon—a Florida federal district court judge overseeing the classified documents case—dismissed the charges last month, ruling that Smith was improperly appointed as special counsel. “The district court’s rationale would likewise raise questions about hundreds of appointments throughout the Executive Branch, including in the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, and Labor,” Smith wrote in his 81-page appeal. “The implausibility of that outcome underscores why the district court’s novel conclusions lack merit.” How long the appeals court will take to issue a decision remains unclear, and the case is almost certainly not going to proceed before the election in November.
• A federal judge on Monday paused for two weeks the implementation of the “Keeping Families Together” program, a Biden administration initiative that would grant illegal aliens with U.S. citizen spouses the ability to apply for a green card without having to leave the U.S. like currently required. Sixteen Republican attorneys general sued the Biden administration on Friday over the measure, arguing it would harm their states by incentivizing illegal migration. U.S. District Court Judge J. Campbell Barker said in his ruling that the plaintiffs’ claims—including about the Biden administration’s authority to bypass Congress to institute such a program—required more time to be fully evaluated. “The claims are substantial and warrant closer consideration than the court has been able to afford to date,” he wrote. The program can continue to accept applications but cannot process them, according to the ruling. 

‘Make America Healthy Again’?

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign keeps delivering the unexpected, whether it’s asking workers at a Philadelphia cheesesteak stand why they don’t use Swiss cheese, advocating for women’s reproductive rights under the mantle of the Republican Party, or gaining the endorsement of the member of the Kennedy family who also has a brain worm.

Kennedy suspended his long-shot independent bid for the presidency on Friday, appearing with Trump and generating splashy headlines for the Trump campaign over the weekend. The endorsement’s exact effect remains unclear, but many of the Trump campaign’s main strengths—and obstacles—remain unchanged: Trump seems to have a polling advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris on the key issues of the economy and immigration, which he leaned on during visits to Pennsylvania and Arizona last week. Still, as his campaign stops also made clear, he’s reluctant to remain focused on those issues—no matter what his advisers say.

Coming off of last week’s Democratic National Convention, Democrats seem energized. But it’s hard to read the polling tea leaves: Harris is currently performing somewhat better than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in late August 2016, and somewhat worse than Biden at the same point in 2020. It’s also unclear how precise polls—which have had variable reliability in recent election cycles—will be this time around.

Because elections are decided by the Electoral College, not the popular vote, Harris will most likely have to “run up the score” on Trump. Winning 50 percent of the popular vote, plus one, will likely not translate to an Electoral College victory. The margins that matter are in the swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where Harris and Trump are locked in close races.

Trump, who’s made a brand over the last nine years out of his freewheeling campaign style, has tried to hammer home a message on areas where he seems to have the country’s backing in those key swing states. Voters, it seems, are not content with the Biden administration’s current policies: A Gallup poll conducted in August found that 73 percent of respondents were dissatisfied with the direction of the country. The sunny vibes of the recent Democratic National Convention, then, should perhaps not be confused as representative of a wider electorate seeking a candidate who radiates positivity. 

While Harris’ supporters are 20 percentage points more likely to say they strongly support her than Biden—and she has won back many of the Democratic voters who fled from the president—her popularity with non-Democratic voters is much less solid. She is still over 7 points underwater in favorability polling, hardly better than Trump’s deficit of 9.5 points.

Tying Harris to the Biden administration “is the simple solution here,” longtime GOP strategist David Kochel told TMD. “This is still a ‘wrong-track’ election, where people are unhappy with where the country and where the economy is. … What they have to do is tie her to the Biden record on inflation, tie her to the wrong track sentiment that exists in the country.”

As he attempts to focus on policy issues amid concerns from within his campaign that he is too focused on personal attacks and his own legal struggles, Trump appears to have hit upon a nickname for Harris: “Comrade Kamala,” portraying Harris as dangerously left-wing.

Speaking in the machine shop of a factory in York, Pennsylvania, last Monday, Trump returned to many of the economic themes that characterized his 2016 campaigns: promising to build an economy centered on American manufacturing might and portraying his opponents as beholden to foreign interests. “Together,” he promised, “we will reclaim our nation’s destiny as the number one manufacturing superpower in the world. We will do it, and China won’t even be close.”

Proudly recounting that he had withdrawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiated by former President Barack Obama, renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, and “stood up to China,” Trump cast himself as the only candidate willing to protect domestic interests. “Kamala wants no taxes on Chinese producers,” he said. “Under her plan, manufacturers will pay even higher taxes in America than in communist China. By contrast, I will pass tax cuts for workers and keep their jobs here in the United States.”

In Arizona on Friday, Trump held a press event at the border featuring the families of those who had been the victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. He attempted to tie Harris to the Biden administration’s border record. “As border czar,” he said, “she flooded America with savage illegal alien criminals who have been raping, pillaging, and killing our cities and our towns.”

Still, the former president struggled to stay on message during last week’s campaign stops. In Pennsylvania, after garnering loud applause with the line, “Comrade Kamala Harris, you’re fired!” Trump immediately launched into a five-minute tangent on the House Ways and Means Committee’s 292-page report on alleged Biden family corruption. During a press event at the Arizona border, he opened with comments about the Democratic Party “coup” against Biden, before abruptly transitioning into a discussion of illegal immigration.

Sen. J.D. Vance’s efforts on the campaign trail have seemingly not helped matters. Whether it be the cheesesteak incident, leading his entourage (fruitlessly) to Kamala Harris’ plane on the tarmac, or struggling to order donuts, the vice presidential nominee has generally not been able to focus on what was supposed to be his strength: ideological conviction and deep policy knowledge.

Trump has loudly, and publicly, defended airing out personal issues over the protests of his staff. “They’re knocking the hell out of me, and [my advisers] say I shouldn’t get personal,” Trump said Friday during his rally in Glendale, Arizona. During the Democratic National Convention, speakers of all stripes had mocked Trump unrelentingly. “I have to get personal,” he said. The crowd cheered.

But as of Friday, Trump also has one fewer presidential adversary in the field: Just hours before Trump’s rally in Glendale, independent presidential candidate RFK Jr. announced the end to his presidential campaign and threw his support behind Trump—more or less. While not entirely withdrawing from the race, he said that he would be taking his name off the ballot in swing states where he might act as a spoiler. “Staying on the ballot in battleground states would likely hand over the election to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues: censorship, war, and chronic disease,” Kennedy said while suspending his campaign.

RFK Jr.—who ran on environmentalism, opposition to vaccination, and a deep distrust of government agencies like the FBI, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration—saw his campaign’s poll numbers plummet from a high of around 10 percent to around 4 percent after Biden withdrew from the race. He had also been the subject of several, well, deeply strange media stories: telling Roseanne Barr that he had dumped a roadkill bear carcass in Central Park, or revealing that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain.

RFK’s endorsement of Trump comes after weeks of attempts on Kennedy’s part to reach out to both campaigns, offering an endorsement in exchange for a potential role in an administration. While he made no headway with Harris, he met in person with Trump at the Republican National Convention in Wisconsin. Trump has also said he is open to giving Kennedy a role in his administration. Though Kennedy—a member of the most famous political dynasty in American history—has for most of his life considered himself a Democrat, he nevertheless hitched his wagon to the Republican candidate.  

In his joint appearance with Kennedy in Glendale, Trump was visibly pleased to introduce him as his newfound ally. Emerging to the Foo Fighters hit “My Hero,” Kennedy asked the crowd: “Don’t you want a president that’s going to make America healthy again?” Trump promised to “establish a panel of top experts” to work with Kennedy, on investigating a supposed “decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases.” 

Whatever his exact role in a potential Trump administration—RFK said Monday in an interview with Tucker Carlson that he’d been asked to be on the potential presidential transition team—the effect of Kennedy’s endorsement is uncertain. Complicating matters is the fact that most pollsters seemed to think that he drew similar levels of support away from both Harris and Trump. But there is simply very little information yet available on how Kennedy’s voters will decide to move, if at all. 

David Winston, a political strategist and polling analyst, told TMD that much hinges on how many Kennedy voters “simply wanted to support a third-party candidate, versus if they were really supportive of any direction he wanted to go.

The share of voters backing Kennedy before his withdrawal was small, regardless, so it remains likely that the electoral effect will be quite muted. But Winston stressed that it was simply too early to tell: “For the Trump team, it’s a positive. It’s just [whether] it’s a small positive, or a big positive.” 

Add in the fact that polling, despite the millions of dollars and thousands of hours poured into the industry, is an imprecise science, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the election remains very close to a coin flip. “Kamalementum” might have saved the Democrats from certain defeat, but Trump’s campaign can likely still see a path to victory.

Worth Your Time

• It’s now been three years since U.S. forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. Writing in Reason, Fiona Harrigan talked to an Afghan ally of U.S. forces who recounted the fallout from those chaotic days. “The Taliban were not supposed to enter Kabul,” an Afghan man, identified as Baryalai, told Harrigan. “Baryalai spent the next two and a half years on the run. Since he had worked with the U.S., the risk of Taliban retribution was high. Interpreters have been hunted down, tortured, and killed since the Taliban took power. ‘I was living in hiding with my family. From one city to another, changing locations,’ he says. Things weren’t supposed to go this way. In return for his service to the U.S., Baryalai was eligible for a sanctioned escape—a visa pathway specifically designed for allies like him, a reward for years of faithful military service. If that pathway wasn’t backlogged and addled by bureaucracy, he might have gotten out of Afghanistan far earlier. Instead of cashing in on a promise made by the U.S. government, Baryalai and thousands of other Afghan allies were forced to fashion their own paths forward.”
• Can small acts of charity really make a difference? For Vox, Rachel M. Cohen explained how she redeemed volunteerism for herself. “As a left-leaning college student, I was persuaded by leaders who warned that personal consumer choices would never amount to real social change,” she wrote. “For real social progress, we’d need systematic policy shifts, comprehensive legislation, and political power. … In a way, it can feel safe to distrust the value of individual action. Being wary of philanthropy and charitable groups that promise to better the world resonates with the skepticism I’ve been trained to have, professionally and culturally. It also allows me to avoid making sacrifices; there’s no real vulnerability or bets required. But as time goes on, and as I think about the family I might one day raise, I’m coming to appreciate the value of letting go and taking gambles on hope, as long as they point generally in the moral direction I want to go.” 

Presented Without Comment

The White House: Statement by Vice President Harris on the Anniversary of the Terrorist Attack Outside Kabul Airport

As I have said, President Biden made the courageous and right decision to end America’s longest war. Over the past three years, our Administration has demonstrated we can still eliminate terrorists, including the leaders of al-Qaeda and ISIS, without troops deployed into combat zones.

Also Presented Without Comment

CNBC: Trump Says [Elon] Musk Wouldn’t Have Time to Be in His White House Cabinet, but Could ‘Consult’

In the Zeitgeist

On Monday, the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays resumed a baseball game that had been rescheduled after being suspended due to rain in late June. No big deal—except catcher Danny Jansen was traded from the Blue Jays to the Red Sox on July 27. 

The result? He became the first player in Major League Baseball history to play for both teams in the same games, and—on the stat sheet at least—serve as both the batter and the catcher in the same at-bat.

Toeing the Company Line

• It’s Tuesday, which means Dispatch Live (🔒) returns tonight at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT! Kevin and the team will discuss the news of the week and, of course, take plenty of viewer questions! Keep an eye out for an email later today with information on how to tune in.
• In the newsletters: Kevin outlined the (🔒) “extraordinary opportunity” Vice President Kamala Harris has if she continues courting centrists and disaffected Republicans, the Dispatch Politics team highlighted Democrats’ aspirations to remake the Supreme Court and reported on the immense cash at the Harris campaign’s disposal, and Nick navigated (🔒) the recent Dispatch v. Bulwark showdown.
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David talk are joined on Advisory Opinions by Matt Martens to discuss his new book, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal.
• On the site: Drucker takes a look at what might be next for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Stirewalt checks in on undecided voters.

Let Us Know

What do you think of RFK? Do you think his endorsement will make a difference for Trump?