schedule
Happy Tuesday! And congratulations to Scooter, the weirdest-looking dog at the 2023 Sonoma-Marin Fair. “Ugly is in the eye of the beholder,” the local news writeup read. “And the judges beheld Scooter.”
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- In his first public remarks since his forces abruptly ended their march toward Moscow Saturday, Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said Monday his aim was not to overthrow Russian President Vladimir Putin, but to ensure the survival of his private military company—set to be brought under Russian defense ministry control or else disbanded by July 1. Prigozhin added Belarus, where he’s reportedly being exiled, will allow Wagner to continue operations. Putin also spoke publicly about the weekend’s events on Monday, saying the “organizers”—he didn’t name Prigozhin—would be “brought to justice” while Wagner soldiers themselves were free to go to Belarus. President Joe Biden told reporters Monday that the United States and its allies had nothing to do with Wagner’s mutiny.
- As Russia continues to grapple with the aftermath of that rebellion, Ukraine has gained new ground in its counteroffensive. According to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the country’s forces on Monday retook control of Rivnopil, a village in southeastern Ukraine that was largely destroyed during its Russian occupation. Rivnopil is reportedly the ninth village Ukraine has recaptured since its counteroffensive campaign began this spring.
- CNN on Monday obtained an audio recording of former President Donald Trump’s July 2021 conversation with ghostwriters for a political memoir in which he allegedly shared classified material related to U.S. military plans vis-a-vis Iran. “I have a big pile of papers,” Trump says as documents can be heard rustling. “[The Pentagon] presented me this.” The audio—which is expected to play a major role in special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump—also includes the former president acknowledging that the material he’s discussing is “highly confidential” and that he hadn’t declassified it before leaving office.
- The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by the state of Louisiana Monday, reinstating a lower court ruling requiring Louisiana state legislators to redraw congressional districts to create a second majority black district. The ruling follows a similar case the Supreme Court decided earlier this month that reinforced the provisions in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protecting the voting power of racial minorities. The high court also declined to take up a case regarding a challenge to a North Carolina charter school’s dress code, leaving in place a lower court ruling that said the dress code requiring girls to wear skirts violated federal law.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis unveiled an expansive immigration policy agenda during a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border on Monday. DeSantis’ plans include ending birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S., completing the wall along the southern border, keeping asylum seekers in Mexico while their cases are pending, and reserving the right to deploy U.S. troops to Mexico to combat drug cartels.
- John Goodenough, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who helped create the lithium-ion battery, died Sunday at 100 years old. He was the oldest Nobel laureate in history, winning the prize at age 97, and his contributions to the rechargeable lithium-ion battery paved the way for countless devices and machines that have since become ubiquitous.
SCOTUS’ Discretion on Discretion
Supreme Court justices may be saving the juiciest cases for last—we’re on high alert for news later this morning—but that doesn’t mean there haven’t already been plenty of interesting verdicts handed down this month. On Friday, for example, an overwhelmingly united Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that officials in Texas and Louisiana don’t have standing to challenge what they consider the Biden administration’s lax immigration enforcement guidelines.
At issue was a September 2021 memo issued by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas directing immigration authorities—theoretically tasked with deporting the millions of people in the United States illegally—to prioritize for removal only those undocumented immigrants who threaten national security, public safety, or border security. “The fact an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” Mayorkas wrote in the guidelines. “We will use our discretion and focus our enforcement resources in a more targeted way. Justice and our country’s well-being require it.”
Worth Your Time
- Vladimir Putin’s regime has cultivated apathy among its citizens. Over the weekend, this came back to bite him, Anne Applebaum writes in a piece for The Atlantic. “In a way, the strangest aspect of Saturday’s aborted coup was the reaction of the people of Rostov-on-Don, including the city’s military leaders, to the soldiers who arrived and declared themselves to be their new rulers,” she notes. “The Wagner mercenaries showed up in the city early Saturday morning. They met no resistance. Nobody shot at them. Early in the morning, a few people came to gawk, but not many. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war.”
- Why is seemingly every political commentator fixated on 2024 hopeful Tim Scott’s race? “The news coverage of his campaign offers a peculiar and perverse window into our cultural inability to talk about Black Republicans in ways that don’t treat them as political curios (at best) or end in accusations of racial heresy (at worst),” Tyler Austin Harper argues for the Washington Post. “Politicians and political figures who don’t fit neatly within tightly calibrated models of Black political thought—which is to say, somewhere between the normie liberal center and the progressive fringe—are objects of exoticization that would have made a 19th-century anthropologist blush. What starts as mere curiosity often turns into assertions of betrayal. All too often, public criticism of Black conservatives ends up implying that there is a difference—as Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times once implied in an infamous tweet—between being ‘racially Black’ and ‘politically Black.’ It should not be controversial to say that putting such straitjackets on permissible Black political sentiment is racist.”
Presented Without Comment
NPR: Harvard Professor Who Studies Dishonesty is Accused of Falsifying Data
Also Presented Without Comment
National Review: Democratic Senator Admits He Opposes Any Legal Limit on Abortion Before a Baby’s Due Date
Also Also Presented Without Comment
The Hill: Chris Christie on Trump’s Weight Insults: ‘Oh, Like He’s Some Adonis?’
Toeing the Company Line
- It’s Tuesday, which means Dispatch Live (🔒) returns tonight at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT! Declan 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: The Dispatch Politics crew details the White House’s dodge on Hunter Biden and the results of the Virginia state legislative primaries, Kevin argues (🔒) the New Right is intellectually bankrupt, and Nick draws parallels (🔒) between Prigozhin’s putsch and Russia’s failures in the war with Ukraine.
- On the podcasts: Adam talks to scholar and columnist Walter Russell Mead about how the war in Ukraine might end on The Dispatch Podcast, and Sarah is joined on The Dispatch Book Club (🔒) by author Del Wilber to discuss his book on the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Advisory Opinions’ schedule this week will be tethered to the release of major Supreme Court decisions.
- On the site today: Audrey B. digs into the U.S. military’s recent recruiting shortfalls and Jacob Becker reflects on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision on prayer in school, one year later.
Let Us Know
Does the Supreme Court’s ruling give the executive branch too wide a berth to implement immigration policy? Is Justice Alito right that the decision violates the court’s own 2007 precedent?
Declan Garvey is the executive editor at the Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2019, he worked in public affairs at Hamilton Place Strategies and market research at Echelon Insights. When Declan is not assigning and editing pieces, he is probably watching a Cubs game, listening to podcasts on 3x speed, or trying a new recipe with his wife.
Mary Trimble is a former editor of The Morning Dispatch.
Grayson Logue is a staff writer for The 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 writing pieces for the website, he is probably working hard to reduce the number of balls he loses on the golf course.
Jacob Wendler is an intern for The Dispatch.
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.
With your membership, you only have the ability to comment on The Morning Dispatch articles. Consider upgrading to join the conversation everywhere.