The Morning Dispatch: Trump Tries Shaking Up His Campaign

Happy Friday! It is Friday, right?

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• A record 75,080 new cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in the United States yesterday, with 9 percent of the 830,918 tests reported coming back positive. And 920 new deaths were attributed to the virus on Thursday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 138,339.

• A spokesman for Vladimir Putin denied the charges, but U.S., U.K., and Canadian intelligence agencies reported on Thursday persistent efforts by Russian hackers to breach organizations working on coronavirus vaccines.

• An additional 1.3 million Americans filed initial jobless claims last week, per the Labor Department. More than 32 million Americans remained on some form of unemployment in the week leading up to June 27. The CARES Act’s temporary expansion of unemployment benefits is set to expire on July 31.

• The Supreme Court denied a request to block a Florida law that would require convicted felons to pay outstanding fines and fees related to their crimes before regaining their right to vote. Justices Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor dissented. “This Court’s order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida’s primary election simply because they are poor,” Sotomayor wrote.

• Wesley Purkey, 68, was executed by lethal injection for the 1998 kidnapping and murder of a 16-year-old girl after a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on the issue early Thursday morning. Purkey’s federal execution is the second carried out since 2003; the first was earlier this week.

• Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced Thursday he is suing Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms over her recent mask mandate for the city, claiming it violates his emergency orders. Kemp signed an executive order on Wednesday extending the state’s public emergency and “strongly encourag[ing]” mask wearing, without requiring it.

• On a call with reporters yesterday, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie said that 26,000 veterans have been infected with the coronavirus thus far, but only 10 in one of the VA’s 134 nursing homes across the country have.

Trump Shakes Up His Campaign

After weeks of reporting that such a move was imminent, President Trump officially demoted his campaign manager Brad Parscale on Wednesday evening, elevating deputy campaign manager Bill Stepien to take his place. Parscale had reportedly been on the ropes since the campaign’s poorly attended rally in Tulsa last month.

The president reportedly met with Stepien—who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign before moving to the White House as political director—on Tuesday night to iron out the details of the new campaign structure. Stepien worked on the George Bush 2004 and John McCain 2008 presidential campaigns before joining Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey as deputy chief of staff until he was let go in 2014 after his involvement in the “Bridgegate” lane closure scandal. “I was disturbed by the tone and behavior and attitude of callous indifference that was displayed in the emails by my former campaign manager, Bill Stepien,” Christie said at the time. “And reading that, it made me lose my confidence in Bill’s judgment. And you cannot have someone at the top of your political operation who you do not have confidence in.” Stepien was not charged with a crime for his involvement.

Trump campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley insisted Thursday morning that Parscale’s change in title did not constitute a demotion. “The only thing that shifted was Donald Trump simply asked Bill to steer the ship and Brad to man the guns,” he said. 

“President Trump and Brad Parscale have built an unprecedentedly strong campaign based on data and technology and Brad will remain heavily involved,” Stepien said in a statement. “We will expose Joe Biden as a hapless tool of the extreme left and contrast his failures with the undeniable successes of President Trump. The same media polls that had the world convinced that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016 are trying the same trick again in 2020. It won’t work.”

Despite the cheery spin, campaigns in a hole as deep as Trump’s often use “shakeups” in an attempt to change the narrative. Trump has cycled through several different campaign managers since announcing for president in 2015, and Parscale actually lasted longer than most. Roger Stone (more of an adviser than a manager) left the Trump campaign shortly after it launched, and was replaced by Corey Lewandowski until June 2016, when Paul Manafort briefly took the helm. Kellyanne Conway replaced Manafort as campaign manager in August 2016, and Steve Bannon joined her as campaign chief executive.

No doubt Team Trump sees Parscale’s demotion as an opportunity for a reset. The president’s disapproval rating is near all-time highs, and poll after poll shows him trailing his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, by double digits. The FiveThirtyEight national polling average shows a 9.1-point spread between the candidates, and key swing states don’t paint a much rosier picture.

One of Stepien’s immediate priorities will be preparing for the Republican National Convention. The event—set to take place in late August—was moved from Charlotte to Jacksonville after North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper warned coronavirus restrictions could remain in place. Confirmed cases are now surging in Florida, however, and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel shared plans to scale back attendance in a letter to convention delegates on Thursday morning.

Several prominent GOPers—particularly older senators and representatives—have announced their plans to skip the event. Sens. Pat Roberts of Kansas (84), Chuck Grassley of Iowa (86), Lamar Alexander of Tennessee (80), Roy Blunt of Missouri (70), and Susan Collins of Maine (67) all plan to stay home next month. Florida Reps. Francis Rooney and Mario Diaz-Balart are also passing, despite the convention’s relocation to their home state.

Is COVID Airborne After All?

In the early days of the pandemic, authorities painted a specific picture of what COVID transmission looked like. “The virus that causes COVID-19 is mainly transmitted through droplets generated when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or speaks,” World Health Organization messaging maintained in March. “These droplets are too heavy to hang in the air. They quickly fall on floors or surfaces.” Frequently wash your hands, disinfect potentially contaminated surfaces, and stay at least six feet away from potential carriers, authorities said, and you’d be in good shape. 

Now scientists aren’t so sure. Earlier this month, more than 200 scientists from dozens of countries sent an open letter to WHO urging the organization to update its guidance to reflect the fact that the virus also lives on aerosols—much smaller particles that remain airborne for far longer, elevating the risks of transmission.

COVID transmission via aerosols would explain a number of perplexing questions that have bedeviled us this summer about how the virus spreads, such as why it’s so much more contagious indoors than outside. As Andrew details over at the site today: 

If COVID is primarily transmitted via ballistic droplets—I breathe out, or yell, or sneeze, and fire off droplets that happen to hit your eyes, mouth, or nose before they hit the ground—then that should be able to happen outdoors as easily as in, and superspreader events would have to be attributed to really rotten ballistic luck.

If transmission also takes place in large part via particles small enough to hang in the air, however, both superspreaders and increased indoor transmission risk make a great deal of sense. Two people six feet apart, no matter the setting, are largely safe from one another’s ballistic droplets. In addition to those droplets, however, each of them will also exhale a gradually growing and expanding cloud of aerosols, which given enough time in an unventilated room will spread throughout the space. If viruses can be carried by vapor that small, then the longer an infected person and uninfected people share the same space, the greater number of particles will be transmitted and the greater the infection risk grows. Give it enough time in a small enough space with enough other people around, and presto—you’ve got your superspreader event.

Outdoors, the slightest touch of a breeze will likely be enough to sweep those aerosols away, thinning the cloud until the particles are extremely unlikely to give anyone enough of a dose of the virus to make them sick.

If the virus does indeed linger in the air as these scientists argue, that would have substantial ramifications for how we fight it at the individual level. Masking and distancing would still be important, but now too would a number of other things, including minimizing duration of time spent in indoor public spaces and maximizing ventilation of buildings where people from different households congregate. 

Worth Your Time

• Larry Hogan, the moderate Republican governor of Maryland, published an op-ed in The Washington Post excoriating President Trump and the federal government for leaving his state—as well as many others—defenseless in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. The administration’s failure was part old-fashioned incompetence, part intentional negligence, Hogan writes. But whatever the motivation, Trump was clearly uninterested in taking decisive action, even as other developed countries were urgently mobilizing to expand testing capacity and taking preemptive measures to contain the virus. “I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals,” Hogan writes. “Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response.”

• In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum catalogs the transformation of Laura Ingraham from an optimistic Reaganite to a more hardened, angry, and apocalyptic right-winger. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Ingraham’s post-Cold War conservatism “was energetic, reformist, and generous, predicated on faith in the United States, a belief in the greatness of American democracy, and an ambition to share that democracy with the rest of the world,” writes Applebaum, who has known Ingraham casually for decades. But the prominent Fox News commentator, like so many on the right, has shifted to a bitter, hardline, grievance politics that sees America—and Western civilization writ large—as being on the precipice of total destruction.

• Polish president Andrzej Duda’s close re-election win highlighted an emerging philosophical ethos on the European right that is altogether different from the conservatism of the Anglo-American tradition. Duda’s hard-right populist Law and Justice party is significantly more statist and economically protectionist than the major centrist and center-left opposition parties in the Polish government, in distinct contrast to the more classically liberal politics of conservatism in the U.S. and U.K. Mathis Bitton’s recent piece in National Review explores the differences between the American right and the emergent European one, and what those differences mean for the future of the West.

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Toeing the Company Line

• On the latest episode of Advisory Opinions, Sarah and David are joined by Josh Blackman, associate professor of law at the South Texas College of Law Houston, to discuss the shifting currents on the Roberts court and what it means for the future of the judiciary.

• Iran has experienced a series of fires and explosions that seem random but happen to take place at major industrial and military sites. Charlotte Lawson talks to experts about what might be going on.

Let Us Know

Is there anything the Trump campaign can do to boost its chances in November that does not involve a change in behavior by President Trump himself?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Nate Hochman (@njhbochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph of Brad Parscale by Samuel Corum/Getty Images.