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Poor Jobs Report Sparks Recession Fears
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Poor Jobs Report Sparks Recession Fears

The economy starts to slow heading into a turbulent election season.

Happy Monday! The word “weird” has been doing a lot of heavy lifting in the last few weeks as applied to the Republican ticket. Not to be outdone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted in a video filmed with … Rosanne Barr over the weekend that he dumped a dead bear cub—that he’d found hit by a car—in Central Park a decade ago and tried to make it seem like it had been hit by a bike.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

  • The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) struck what it described as a Hamas “command and control” center in Gaza City on Saturday, which was reportedly being housed in a school. Hamas claimed the airstrike killed dozens of Palestinians, though the IDF said the school was used to hide and train terrorists, and to build and store explosive weapons. “Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of precise munitions, surveillance and additional intelligence,” the IDF said in a statement. Meanwhile, a Palestinian man stabbed and killed a 66-year-old woman and a man in his 70s—and left two others injured—near Tel Aviv in Holon, Israel, on Sunday morning in what law enforcement has labeled a suspected terrorist attack. Local police killed the assailant—a resident of the West Bank in his 20s who had illegally crossed into Israel—shortly after the stabbing spree began.
  • Israel and Hezbollah—the Lebanon-based, Iranian-supported terrorist organization—exchanged light fire on Sunday, though neither side reported any casualties. Israel is bracing for major, coordinated attacks by Iran, Hezbollah, and other Tehran-backed militias across the region after two terrorist leaders were assassinated last week, likely by Israeli forces. Axios reported Sunday night that Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Group of Seven allies that attacks on Israel could begin as early as Monday. Ten countries—including the United Statesissued warnings urging their civilians to leave Lebanon amid fears of escalating violence between Israel and Hezbollah.
  • Vice President Kamala Harris clinched the Democratic nomination for president on Friday after securing enough votes during the Democratic Committee’s virtual roll call ahead of the convention later this month. On Sunday, Harris met with three vice-presidential finalists to join the party ticket—Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—at the vice president’s office and residence in Washington, D.C. Harris is expected to select her vice presidential candidate today or tomorrow, with the two set to appear together at a Philadelphia campaign rally on Tuesday.
  • Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday revoked a plea deal for three terrorists involved in plotting the attacks of September 11, 2001, who are being held at Guantánamo Bay. Detained since 2003, the trio had reached an unofficial plea agreement with United States military prosecutors last week that would have spared them the death penalty in exchange for life-long imprisonment. Austin rescinded the deal, saying in a memo that the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me.” The details of the plea deal have not yet been released, and it remains unclear what motivated the Defense Department’s decision to reverse course. 
  • Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado risked arrest on Saturday, emerging from hiding to address a mass rally of thousands of supporters in Caracas protesting incumbent socialist President Nicolás Maduro’s reelection claims, a result the U.S. officially considers fraudulent. Pro-Maduro forces have arrested more than two thousand protesters since government officials declared Maduro the winner in last Sunday’s election despite exit polls showing a landslide victory for opposition candidate Edmundo González. Venezuela election officials affiliated with Maduro’s regime have so far not released full election tallies.
  • Bangladeshi government forces cracked down on student-led protests this weekend, leading to renewed clashes throughout the country that have killed dozens of people. Violent protests, which began in June over the lack of merit-based opportunities for Bangladeshi government jobs, have resulted in more than 200 deaths and thousands of injuries in total. Protest leaders are planning to march on the capital of Dhaka today to demand the resignation of authoritarian Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who has led the nation since 2009, while her government has implemented a nationwide curfew of 6 p.m. 
  • Al-Shabaab—an affiliate of the Islamic terrorist organization al-Qaeda—took responsibility for a beachfront hotel attack that killed at least 32 people and left more than 60 injured in Somalia’s capital city, Mogadishu, late Friday. An Al-Shabab suicide bomber detonated his vest outside the hotel on Friday night, and armed men entered the hotel shortly after and took civilians hostage. The violent confrontation ended early Saturday morning when Somali law enforcement stopped what it identified as all five attackers—four of whom were killed, and the other captured and detained.
  • Tropical Storm Debby—which strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane overnight—is on course to make landfall in Florida this morning. Debby whirled through the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday—at maximum sustained winds of 80 miles per hour—and is expected to make its way up the Southeast coast this week. 

Recession Watch? 

Economic analysts have been predicting a recession for years at this point, with the thought being that the economy would eventually need a hard correction to account for levels of inflation not seen in 40 years. But just about every economist has been wrong at some point over the last two years about the precise timing of when that inevitable recession would come, and many had begun to think the economy could manage a “soft landing,” in which the inflation rate falls back to normal without an accompanying rise in the unemployment rate. 

Well, it was nice while it lasted. A weaker-than-expected jobs report on Friday—which came just two days after the Federal Reserve opted to keep interest rates at their current elevated levels—signaled that the much-anticipated downturn could finally be here.

The unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report released on Friday—up from 4.1 percent in June. Employers added just 114,000 new jobs last month, well short of economists’ consensus expectations of 175,000. The report revised May and June’s numbers downwards, meaning there were fewer new jobs in the last three months than previously thought, and the number of weekly unemployment claims reached an 11-month high last week—all further signs of …


As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,462-word story on the Labor Department’s recent jobs report and fears of an impending recession is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

  • In the New York Times, our old friend David French interviewed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch ahead of the release of Gorsuch’s new book—Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law—later this week. “I’ve been a judge for about 18 years now,” Gorsuch told French of the reasoning behind the book. “And I just have seen so many cases in which ordinary, hard-working, decent Americans, trying to do their best and intending no harm to anyone, just get caught up in a wall of rules or laws that they didn’t know existed. … The founders also knew that too much law poses some dangers as well. James Madison talked about that in The Federalist, and he said a couple of things happen. One, you start losing your liberties. And two, it impacts different populations differently. So the moneyed and the connected can find their way through a maze of litigation and through a maze of regulation. But what about ordinary Americans?” 
  • A widespread push to oust controversial professors from their academic positions—what some may call “cancel culture”—is often a left-wing problem. Writing in Newsweek, Rachel Dobkin showed that’s not always the case. “An increasing number of academics are speaking out about Christian colleges, claiming they were forced out of their jobs because of the rising intensity of conservative politics on campuses,” she wrote. The professors say they’ve been booted for “being perceived as too liberal, even if they didn’t identify as such. … Matt Warner started at Grace College in Indiana as a communications professor in the fall of 2023. Six weeks into his employment, local activists came across his social media posts spanning 10 years. … He claimed they then started a ‘smear campaign’ and ‘tried to get him fired.’” They ultimately succeeded, and Grace College chose to not renew Warner’s contract. “Warner claimed that people like himself can be forced out of their institutions for a multitude of reasons, which are almost always outside the bounds of the institutions’ written policies: ‘Whether that’s opposition to [former President] Donald Trump, whether that’s not having strong convictions on LGBTQ+ issues … whether it’s support of Black Lives Matter … or even being a member of the wrong denomination.’”

Presented Without Comment

Washington Post: Trump Congratulates [Russian President Vladimir] Putin Over Deal That Brought Evan Gershkovich Home

Also Presented Without Comment 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Jimmy Carter’s Next Goal is Voting for Kamala Harris for President

In the (Olympic) Zeitgeist

It was a big, history-making weekend for Americans at the Olympics. Bobby Finke set a world record in the 1,500-meter freestyle swim; Noah Lyles was crowned “fastest man alive” when he won the 100-meter dash by mere thousandths of a second, breaking a 40-year drought for the U.S.; Katie Ledecky won her ninth career gold medal, after winning the 800-meter freestyle race that started it all for her when she was just 15; Simone Biles won gold in the vault competition and teammate Jade Carey took bronze; Scottie Scheffler came from behind to win the golf competition; and cyclist Kristen Faulkner stunned with an unexpected victory in the 98-mile road race that finished in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

So, you know, just another day at the office. 

Chart via Joe Schueller.
Chart via Joe Schueller.

Toeing the Company Line

  • In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team—joined by Morning Dispatcher Grayson—reported on former President Donald Trump’s new race-based line of attack, Jonah dove into the problems politicians can run into when they pander, Chris argued that (🔒) Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro could help pivot Harris’ presidential campaign toward the center, and Jake Meador explained in Dispatch Faith how post-liberal Christians came to embrace a political movement he argues is at odds with their values.
  • On the podcasts: Jonah ruminated on Social Darwinism falsehoods, the pronunciation of “Kamala,” and Trump’s latest attack on Harris.
  • On the site over the weekend: Kevin argued Trump compares unfavorably to Hannibal Lecter, former Dispatcher Alec Dent returned for a review of the latest Marvel movie, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Warren Cole Smith laid out what the Daily Wire’s Megan Basham got wrong in her new book Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
  • On the site today: Daniel Di Martino writes about what comes next for Venezuela after Nicolás Maduro’s sham election victory and Rebeccah Heinrichs looks into what Kamala Harris’ foreign policy might look like—and doesn’t like what she sees.

Mary Trimble is a former editor of The Morning Dispatch.

Grayson Logue is the deputy editor of The Morning Dispatch and is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the company in 2023, he worked in political risk consulting, helping advise Fortune 50 companies. He was also an assistant editor at Providence Magazine and is a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh, pursuing a Master’s degree in history. When Grayson is not helping write The Morning Dispatch, he is probably working hard to reduce the number of balls he loses on the golf course.

Peter Gattuso is a fact check reporter for The Dispatch, based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2024, he interned at The Dispatch, National Review, the Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. When Peter is not fact-checking, he is probably watching baseball, listening to music on vinyl records, or discussing the Jones Act.

Grant Lefelar is a former intern at The Dispatch. Prior to joining the company for the 2024 summer, he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wrote for a student magazine, Carolina Review, and covered North Carolina state politics and news for Carolina Journal.

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