Trump and Allies Stoke Fears About Noncitizens Voting

Happy Wednesday! And happy birthday to TMD! Five years ago today, Declan and our old pal Andrew Egger published the first edition of this newsletter. It didn’t have Quick Hits yet, but what it did have was, well, a whole lot of heart. 

To those of you who have been with us since Day 1—thanks. To those of you just joining us, we’re glad you’re here. We know we speak for current and former Morning Dispatchers when we say it’s been a pleasure to share the last five years with you. Here’s to many more years of ribbing Steve about his sports teams! 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• In a press conference on Tuesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that the U.S. government supports Israel’s recent military operations targeting Hezbollah, the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based terrorist organization, and is no longer in favor of a ceasefire between the two parties. “The situation on the ground has changed,” Miller said, responding to the reversal. 
• The largest public water and wastewater utility company in the U.S., American Water, said Monday that it was the victim of a cybersecurity attack after detecting “unauthorized authority” on its online network and computer systems late last week. While the company—which provides service for about 14 million customers across 24 states—said that all of its water and wastewater utility services appear to be unaffected by the cybersecurity breach, it was nevertheless temporarily pausing billing. Law enforcement is investigating the hack, though it’s not yet clear who was responsible. 
• New York City First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, a longtime ally to New York City Mayor Eric Adams, resigned from her position on Tuesday, less than two weeks after the Justice Department indicted Adams on a series of bribery and campaign finance charges. Early last month, federal investigators seized Wright’s phone, along with those of her brother-in-law and her husband—both of whom have recently resigned from positions in the Adams administration. The New York Times first reported Wright’s resignation on Tuesday morning, and Adams confirmed her departure later in the day, announcing that Maria Torres-Springer—a current New York City deputy mayor for housing, economic development, and workforce—will succeed Wright.
• A U.S. State Department official claimed on Monday that China is intentionally oversupplying lithium to “lower the price until competition disappears.” Speaking from Portugal—Europe’s largest producer of the mineral key to battery production—Jose Fernandez, undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment, told reporters China was engaged in “predatory pricing” of the mineral. Lithium prices plummeted by 80 percent in 2023 and have fallen 21 percent this year.
• The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics to American physicist John Hopfield and British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton for research and discoveries “that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” technological innovations that led to modern artificial intelligence technologies. Hopfield and Hinton developed distinct networks inspired by the human brain that use physics for machine learning.
• The National Hurricane Center warned on Tuesday that Hurricane Milton’s “intensity has rebounded,” as the Category 5 storm—with sustained winds of 160 miles per hour—is projected to hit the Tampa Bay area on Wednesday. Thirteen Florida counties are now under mandatory evacuation orders. “I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said on Monday, “you are going to die.” President Joe Biden announced on Tuesday he had canceled his trip to Germany and Angola to prepare for hurricane recovery operations, and warned, “This could be the worst storm to hit Florida in over a century.” 
• Filipino government officials said on Tuesday that four Chinese vessels—three from the Chinese Coast Guard and one from the Navy—attempted to block Filipino civilian fishing vessels from delivering supplies to other fishermen in the South China Sea by firing water cannons at the fishing boats. A Chinese Coast Guard spokesman said on Tuesday that its ships “took control measures” against Filipino ships, alleging they intruded into Chinese waters. The conflict occurred near the Scarborough Shoal, a fishing zone that both China and the Philippines claim.
• Attorneys general from 13 states and Washington, D.C., sued the video-based social media app TikTok on Tuesday, accusing the platform of harming young users’ mental health and deceiving the public about the platform’s safety. Led by New York Attorney General Letitia James and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the lawsuit alleges TikTok manipulated users into “compulsive and excessive use,” and was aware its product “caused ongoing harm to young users but failed to adequately warn users or remedy the product’s defects.” TikTok pushed back on allegations in the suit, saying the claims were “inaccurate and misleading.”
• The Biden administration issued new sanctions on Tuesday against Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa—a senior leader in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—for enabling the RSF’s wartime operations in Sudan that led to “brutal RSF atrocities against civilians, which have included war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing.” The RSF—a paramilitary group allied with mostly Arab militias—has been embroiled in a civil war with the Sudanese Armed Forces since April 2023. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that, despite warnings from the U.S. and other entities, the RSF has continued its atrocities against civilian populations, “including those involving sexual violence and ethnically targeted attacks on non-Arab groups.”

Noncitizens Voting? Facts vs. Fiction.

During September’s debate, former President Donald Trump claimed that Democrats were in favor of illegal immigration as part of a concerted plan to gain more voters. “Our elections are bad,” he said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats dismissed the claim as partisan fearmongering. But many Republican elected officials at the federal, state, and local levels are acting as if the prospect of illegal immigrants voting will be a major issue in the upcoming election—a claim that seems likely to resurface if Trump loses in November. 

Voting as a noncitizen at the federal level is already illegal, but it can be allowed at the state and local level—but even that is quite rare, limited to a scattering of municipalities around the country.

At the federal level, Republican efforts to pass laws safeguarding against noncitizen voting have been largely stymied. Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, introduced the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act in May of this year. The bill would …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,691-word item on concerns over noncitizen voting is available in the members-only version of TMD.

Worth Your Time

• Six weeks after Ukrainian troops invaded Russia, they’re still there. “There was no sign of Ukrainian withdrawal, or preparation for a withdrawal, as we traveled,” Oz Katerji wrote for Foreign Policy. “Kyiv hopes that its military gambit in the region will help it turn the tide in the war, which has been marked more by drone-haunted trench warfare than blitzkriegs. … ​​In the Kursk Oblast, however, a Ukrainian theory of victory has emerged, if only still in its conceptual infancy. Like the many successful prisoner-of-war swaps carried out between Kyiv and Moscow since the start of the war, the Ukrainians imagine being able to trade Russian land in Kursk, and potentially farther afield, for their occupied territories, at least in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, if not also Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. The offensive has, at the very least, significantly strengthened their hand in any future negotiations.” 
• Journalists should keep asking Republicans who won the 2020 election, Ramesh Ponnuru argued for the Washington Post. “The people Trump has gulled into thinking he won in 2020 are wrong about a lot of things, but give them credit for this much,” he wrote. “If Biden really had taken the electoral votes of several states where Trump won more legal votes, they would be right to be obsessed about it. What doesn’t make sense is the line that Republican politicians so often want to take: Maybe the election was stolen and maybe it wasn’t, but let’s talk about more pressing issues. … Modern parties usually abandon presidential candidates who lose. Trump’s barrage of falsehoods about the election saved him from that fate and helped him cruise to the Republican nomination. … At least through the end of this campaign, [Republicans] seem to have concluded, they are stuck with the lie. A fantasy about 2020 has the potential to cause them to lose another election in 2024.” 

Presented Without Comment

Elon Musk speaking to Tucker Carlson: 

Musk: I made a joke, which I realized—I deleted—which is like: nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala because it’s pointless. What do you achieve? They’d just find another puppet. 

Carlson: It’s deep and true.

In the Zeitgeist

The editors of this newsletter are not too proud to admit when they’ve been bested, and indeed, Declan beat Mary in this week’s fantasy football matchup. But Mary would also just like to point out that Declan won because the Bears’ QB Caleb Williams allowed wide receiver D.J. Moore to put up some serious numbers, which was only possible because of Bill Murray, an offensive lineman who came off the bench to deliver a standout performance. 

And where did Mr. Murray play college ball? None other than Mary’s alma mater, the College of William & Mary. So you’re welcome, Declan. 

Toeing the Company Line

• The Dispatch’s first employee, Valerie Smith, is taking member questions in this month’s Dispatch Monthly Mailbag (🔒). If you want to know why she joined a company with no name five years ago, what it was like in those early days, or all about her favorite parts of The Dispatch’s company culture, members can drop a question in the comments section here. 
• Our own Sarah Isgur broke down the new Supreme Court term and why the court doesn’t need packing with Sarah McMahon of the Preamble Substack—check it out here!
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew explored where Pennsylvania voters come down on vibes versus issues in the latest installment of their road trip chronicles, and Nick argued (🔒) that the right is trying to memory-hole the attempts to overturn the 2020 election. 
• On the podcasts: Kevin takes over The Remnant to discuss the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and its implications for the upcoming election with Mitch Kokai, senior political analyst at the John Locke Foundation. 
• On the site: Kevin says Trump has decimated—a word he uses advisedly—the GOP, Patrick Brown explores what Vance’s comments about abortion during the veep debate revealed about his ability to sell conservative populism, and Jonah looks into the future of a post-Trump GOP.