The Elon Election

Happy Tuesday! Don’t look now, but there’s just one week until Election Day. No matter how it ends, we can take heart in this: We’ll finally be able to watch a football game again without wading through endless and repetitive political ads. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• In an op-ed on Monday, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defended his paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate for president, saying there is “no quid pro quo of any kind at work” and that he was not aware of the meeting between the chief executives of one of his companies and former President Donald Trump which took place on the day the paper announced it would not endorse either candidate. Bezos also defended his own record as owner of the Post: “I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.” NPR reported Monday that some 200,000 people—roughly 8 percent of the paid subscribers—had canceled their subscription to the paper since publisher Will Lewis announced on Friday the paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate. 
• Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner on Monday sued billionaire Elon Musk over his political action committee’s sponsorship of a $1 million sweepstakes for registered swing state voters who signed a petition calling for free speech and the right to bear arms. The lawsuit alleges that the lottery is illegal because it is not being administered by the state, as Pennsylvania consumer protection laws require. The Department of Justice also warned last week that the sweepstakes could also violate federal laws that bar paying individuals to register to vote.   
• Both presidential campaigns continued their swing state blitz on Monday, with Vice President Kamala Harris campaigning in Michigan and former President Donald Trump traveling to Georgia. Trump met with religious leaders early in the day, before holding a rally at Georgia Tech in downtown Atlanta in the evening. In Michigan, Harris visited a semiconductor manufacturer and a union training facility, and held a rally in Ann Arbor with vice presidential candidate Tim Walz and singer Maggie Rogers.
• The Trump campaign sought to distance itself from racially provocative remarks made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at the former president’s Sunday rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City. Danielle Alvarez, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, wrote that a racially charged joke about Puerto Rico “does not reflect the views of Donald Trump or the campaign.” Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday released an ad referencing the racist statement, saying “Puerto Ricans deserve better.” 
• Axios reported on Sunday that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen—joined by several of her international counterparts—last week warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a letter that the West Bank’s economy faces a looming threat of collapse, should it be cut off from Israel’s financial system. Yellen and the other finance ministers urged Netanyahu to “take steps to decrease” that risk; if Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich does not sign off by October 31 on a periodic waiver that allows Israeli and Palestinian banks to correspond, millions of dollars in international support may not be available for disbursement. Smotrich, leader of the ultranationalist Religious Zionism party, has sought to weaken the Palestinian Authority in the past and accuses Palestinian banks of allowing funding for terrorism.
• Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said on Monday that Iran “will use all available tools to deliver a definite and effective response to the Zionist regime,” the first statement definitively threatening a response to Israel’s weekend strikes on Iran. The Israeli Cabinet on Monday moved its regular meeting to a secret location, in light of Iranian declarations. 
• Thousands of Georgians rallied in the capital of Tbilisi Monday night in protest of alleged corruption in the electoral victory on Saturday of the ruling pro-Russian party, Georgian Dream. Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, called for the protest of an election that she described as “totally falsified.” Thirteen European foreign ministers said Monday that the alleged “violations of electoral integrity are incompatible with the standards expected from a candidate to the European Union,” and both NATO and the U.S. have called for a full investigation into any election violations.
• The Defense Department on Monday warned that around 10,000 North Korean soldiers were moving toward the battlefield in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces have held territory since August. The Pentagon also said Monday that no new limits would be imposed on Ukranian use of American arms if North Koreans became actively involved in hostilities, though the West has maintained restrictions on how deep Ukraine may strike into Russia with Western-provided long-range weapons. 
• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Monday claimed that its raid over the weekend on the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza captured around 100 Hamas militants. Video released by the IDF purports to show a Hamas suspect claiming that the terrorist group was using hospital ambulances to move its operatives around. World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Saturday that only two doctors were left to care for the hospital’s roughly 200 patients after the operation. 
• Federal authorities are investigating fires on Monday that destroyed two ballot drop boxes—one in Vancouver, Washington, and another in Portland, Oregon. Police believe the incidents—which potentially destroyed hundreds of ballots in Vancouver but only a few in Portland—are connected. Authorities discovered what they referred to as “incendiary devices” and a “suspicious vehicle” linking the attacks. 

Dark MAGA 

“I’m not just MAGA,” Elon Musk declared from the stage at the vaunted Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday night. “I’m dark, gothic MAGA.” He gestured at his bespoke Trump campaign hat that was, indeed, dark—with the promise to “Make America Great Again” scrawled in lettering that may as well have said “Make Transylvania Great Again.” 

It was a twist on a line Musk has repeated during a flurry of recent campaign trail appearances in a series of multicolored MAGA hats. On the stump, Musk—the richest man in the world and perhaps former President Donald Trump’s highest-profile booster—often seems more full of enthusiasm for the former president than Trump himself: He bounds around the stage jumping, gesticulating wildly, and vocalizing strangely. 

But it’s been a winding journey to get here for the multi-billionaire tech entrepreneur whose path through the 2024 election cycle began by launching Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign in May 2023. Now, with just a week until Election Day, Musk is undeniably aboard the Trump train—and he’s shoveling in heaps of coal in the form of cold, hard cash and in-kind conspiracy theories on his social media platform and on the trail. 

Musk—who was born in South Africa but apparently obtained U.S. citizenship sometime in the early 2000s, reportedly after a period of questionable immigration status—has for most of his career been …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,780-word item on Elon Musk’s Trump embrace is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Whose idea was it to present Latter-day Saint voters with beer koozies and coffee mugs? The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins chronicled the “thunderously incompetent” rollout of the “Latter-Day Saints for Trump” campaign, and how it might actually have electoral consequences: “There’s little doubt that most LDS voters will support Trump this year,” he wrote. “Conservative attitudes on abortion and other cultural issues guarantee a certain degree of partisan loyalty. But younger Latter-day Saints, who came of age in the Trump era, are significantly less conservative than previous generations. And in the past eight years, some anti-Trump Mormons have gotten more comfortable voting for Democrats instead of third-party protest candidates. … For the Harris campaign, holding on to those voters this year could be the difference between losing Arizona and cracking open a celebratory beverage on Election Night. I know a website where they might be able to get some koozies on sale.”
• Misinformation and disinformation are a problem—but government may not be the solution, Angel Eduardo and Adam Goldstein argued in Quillette. “Ultimately, the core problem with all legislative misinformation bills is that they inevitably position the government as the arbiter of truth,” the pair wrote. “And, as anyone who has heard of George Orwell should know, that’s a terrible proposition—not only because the truth is often elusive, but because government officials have strong incentives to purge public discourse of opinions and narratives that challenge their hold on power. There is no doubt that misinformation is a problem. The inability to agree upon what is and isn’t true clearly hinders our capacity for progress. … But laws are blunt tools and liable to do more harm than good here. Our governments are made up of human beings, susceptible to error. Granting them the power to determine and enforce the truth robs us not just of our agency and right to free expression, but also our responsibility as individuals living in the twenty-first century.”

Presented Without Comment

Semafor: Bodyguards Inadvertently Expose French President Macron’s Location on Strava 

In the Zeitgeist

Just a few weeks after librarians in Leipzig, Germany, announced they’d discovered a new piece by Mozart, another previously unknown work of the classical canon was found in the flotsam and jetsam of a dusty archive: a waltz thought to be the work of famed composer Frédéric Chopin.

This is a public service announcement to museum curators, librarians, and owners of large quantities of paper, wherever they may be: Do an inventory, we beg of you, lest there’s an early draft of the Magna Carta out there gathering dust under your old loan application. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Dispatch Politics covered the push for a positive closing message for Kamala Harris and Nick opined (🔒) on weak men, Jeff Bezos among them. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah and David explored how the election could shape the federal courts on Advisory Opinions. 
• On the site: Charlotte unpacks Israel’s weekend attack on Iran, our symposium series on potential policies of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris concludes with an entry on the rule of law, and Chris Stirewalt makes his best case for why Trump is sure to win next week—and then his best case for why Harris is sure to win.