Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race

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Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• After weeks of mounting pressure from Democratic Party leaders and elected officials, President Joe Biden announced in a series of tweets on Sunday afternoon that he was dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to serve as the Democratic nominee. “While it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term,” Biden, who spent the last several days in Delaware recovering from COVID-19, wrote in a letter. Harris confirmed that she would enter the race later on Sunday, saying, “My intention is to earn and win this nomination.” Dozens of high-profile Democrats, including potential challengers for the nomination, endorsed her bid. Meanwhile, many top Republicans called for Biden to resign from the White House before his term expires in January, questioning his ability to serve as president for the remaining several months. “If Joe Biden is not fit to run for President, he is not fit to serve as President,” GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement. “He must resign the office immediately. November 5 cannot arrive soon enough.”
• CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company that provides antivirus software to many Microsoft Windows computers, caused a large-scale computer malfunction on Friday when it pushed out an update to the millions of computers that run its program. The error in the update led to thousands of flights being canceled on Friday and into the weekend, as well as closures to railways and disruptions to 911 services. Losses caused by the outage could top more than $1 billion, making the IT meltdown potentially the largest in U.S. history. The company said Sunday that “a significant number” of devices affected by the outage were back online.
• Israel bombed the Houthi-controlled port city of Hodeidah in Yemen on Saturday, just days after the Houthis claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Tel Aviv that killed one person. Israel’s attack comes as retaliation for not only last week’s drone attack, but for a months-long campaign of terrorism and maritime attacks, including hundreds of individual strikes, as Hodeidah has been used by the Houthi militia to launch drone and missile attacks on ships passing through the Red Sea. The airstrike targeted the port—which the Israel Defense Forces say is used by the Houthis to receive weapons from Iran—as well as a “dual-use” power station, which was used for both military and civilian purposes. The Houthi-controlled Ministry of Health claimed that at least 80 people were wounded in the attack, most with severe burns.
• United States Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle will answer questions before the Republican-majority House Oversight Committee on Monday amid calls from members of Congress for her resignation following the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania on Saturday became the first Democratic member of Congress to call for Cheatle to resign. “The evidence coming to light has shown unacceptable operational failures,” Boyle said in a statement. “I have no confidence in the leadership of the United States Secret Service if Director Cheatle chooses to remain in her position.” The Secret Service acknowledged Saturday that the agency had denied several requests from Trump’s security team for additional help over the last two years—a reversal from what a Secret Service spokesman said last week. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the shooter had flown a drone over the campaign rally site hours prior to his attempt on Trump’s life.
• New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill on Friday that will prevent students in grades 5 through 12 from joining sports teams for a different sex than that on their birth certificate, requiring schools to designate teams as either for girls, boys, or co-ed. Sununu also signed a measure banning gender transition surgeries for minors, as well as one that will require schools to notify parents when there will be discussions of human sexuality and allow them to opt their children out. The governor vetoed a bill that would have allowed institutions to restrict access to multi-person bathrooms and locker rooms on the basis of biological sex, arguing that it “in some cases it seeks to solve problems that have not presented themselves in New Hampshire, and in doing so, invites unnecessary discord.”
• Democratic Rep. Sheila Lee Jackson of Texas died on Friday at the age of 74. Jackson—who had represented Texas’ 18th Congressional District continuously since 1995 and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Houston last year—announced in June that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but her family did not announce a cause of death. It’s unclear whether Gov. Greg Abbott will call a special election to fill her seat for the remainder of the term, which expires in January. 

Biden Finally Passes the Torch

President Joe Biden will be a one-term president. 

That may be the only thing we can say for certain today. After more than three weeks of unrelenting pressure from politicos, donors, and members of his own party, the 81-year-old president announced his decision to withdraw from the presidential race on Sunday and almost immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him. Key lawmakers, kingmakers, and potential nominees seemed to quickly fall in line with Harris as the new standard-bearer, but the matter is nowhere near settled as Democrats start the countdown to their Chicago convention—now just three weeks away—where the party will formally pick a ticket to face off against former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, in November.

There was no dramatic East Room address to close out Biden’s ill-fated presidential campaign on Sunday, nor a rally where he could make a show of passing the torch to the next generation—as he once promised to do.

No, the president—recovering from COVID-19 at his Rehoboth, Delaware, residence—instead took a page out of his predecessor’s book, delivering history-changing news in a tweet. The statement reportedly came together in less than 24 hours over the weekend, the work of a tight circle of just a couple of Biden’s most trusted advisers. Harris apparently learned of Biden’s decision only minutes before the tweet went live, and many White House staffers found out their boss was dropping out of the race when they saw …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 2,088-word story on Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Writing for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle explored the questions posed by the CrowdStrike IT meltdown. “It’s quite efficient for one firm to serve a large number of important customers, as CrowdStrike does,” she wrote. “In some ways, these concentrated players might provide greater reliability, because they develop a lot of expertise by serving many users, and they can invest more in R&D and security than Bob’s Friendly Local Software Co. can. But when outages happen, they happen to seemingly everyone, everywhere, all at once, leaving users no alternatives. How best to try to manage the trade-off between efficiency and redundancy is a hard question for another day. For the moment, the important thing is to recognize that it exists, and that there’s no easy way around it. We probably should have thought more about such trade-offs when the Great Efficiency Drive was underway. We’ll have to think even harder about them now.”

Presented Without Comment

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, in a tweet referencing Kamala Harris’ viral “coconut tree” saying: “Madam Vice President, we are ready to help.”

Also Presented Without Comment

Associated Press: South Korea Restarts Blaring Propaganda Broadcasts to Retaliate Against North’s Trash Balloon Flying

In the Zeitgeist

California rock band Dawes released the first single off its new album—Oh Brother, out in October—last week. While Declan may take issue with the implication in one lyric in “House Parties” that there’s ever a “wrong time of year” to go to Chicago, we think it’s a fun, light-hearted “yacht rock”-esque tune to get us through these, well, trying times. And for the record, it’s right about Chicago.

Toeing the Company Line

• Will Kamala Harris seize the Democratic nomination? Who would be her running mate? What happens next? Sarah, Jonah, Steve, Mike, and Drucker answered all those questions and more on yet another emergency Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here. 
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team took a look at the “two sides” of former President Donald Trump’s 90-minute speech at the RNC convention, Nick highlighted the (🔒) unserious nature of American politics, Jonah reminded readers that character is destiny, Chris argued that (🔒) last week’s RNC can’t match the drama that was playing out at the White House, and Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili explained in Dispatch Faith how antisemitism in Pittsburgh eroded her hope for unity following the tragedy of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. 
• On the podcasts: Charlotte interviewed Hen Mazzig, a senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, on The Skiff (🔒) to discuss the state of Israel’s war in Gaza, Jonah reflected on the RNC in the weekend solo Remnant, and Jamie is joined on today’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast by Eliot Cohen, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, to discuss what a second Trump term would mean for U.S. foreign policy.
• On the site over the weekend: Ethan McGuire reviewed Kevin Costner’s latest western epic, Horizon, Guy Denton sat down for a conversation with Ace Frehley, the original lead guitarist for the rock band KISS, Samuel Benson documented the Latter-day Saint theology of immigration, and Warren reported on President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. 
• On the site today: Jeffery Tyler Syck explains what went wrong with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Cole Aronson and Avi Bell make the case for an expanded IDF role in post-Hamas Gaza, and Peter, in what was originally going to be today’s main TMD story, reports on the IT meltdown that left millions of airline passengers stranded over the weekend.