Trump Tries to Smoke Out Harris With Media Blitz

Happy Wednesday! Who said romance is dead? Over the weekend, a former congressional staffer married a Maryland National Guardsman whom she met when he was deployed to the Capitol after January 6, and she kept getting lost and passing his checkpoint. Congrats!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The New York Times reported last night that Hunter Biden requested assistance in 2016 from the U.S. ambassador to Italy to aid Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company for which he served as a board member. A lawyer for Biden said the ambassador was one of many people Biden sought to introduce to fellow Burisma executives, but claimed no meeting nor request to U.S. officials ever materialized. “I want to be careful about promising too much,” a Commerce Department official at the U.S. embassy in Rome responded to Biden at the time in a letter. “This is a Ukrainian company and, purely to protect ourselves, [U.S. government] should not be actively advocating with the government of Italy without the company going through the [Commerce Department] Advocacy Center.” The younger Biden has not been charged with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but he is set to face trial next month on tax-related charges after he was convicted on gun-related charges earlier this summer. A White House spokesman claimed President Joe Biden was “not aware when he was vice president that his son was reaching out to the U.S. Embassy in Italy on behalf of Burisma.”
• Former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk Tina Peters was convicted on Tuesday of seven criminal charges—four of which are felony charges—after a jury concluded she permitted unauthorized access to election voting machines as part of a broader effort to falsely claim former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. The 68-year-old former county clerk was found to have hired a technician to steal information from Dominion voting machines—information that was later publicly leaked at an event organized by Trump ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell—and is scheduled to be sentenced in early October. “Today’s verdict is a warning to others that they will face serious consequences if they attempt to illegally tamper with our voting processes or election systems,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “I want to be clear—our elections are safe and fair.”
• Hamas claimed on Monday that, in separate incidents, its guards shot and killed an Israeli hostage held in Gaza and wounded two other Israeli hostages. The terrorist organization blamed Israel’s government for “massacres and the resulting reactions that affect the lives of Zionist prisoners.” The Iranian-backed terrorist organization also claimed it attempted to save the lives of the two injured hostages, but did not disclose the victims’ names or further details. “At this point, we do not have any intelligence support that allows us to refute or confirm the claims of Hamas,” IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari tweeted on Tuesday. “We continue to check and find out the reliability of the message and will update as soon as possible with any information we have.”
• A Bangladeshi court has opened a murder investigation into Bangladesh’s former authoritarian Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina—who resigned her office and fled the country earlier this month following student-led, anti-regime protests—along with six other leading government officials. A Bangladeshi businessman originally sought to press charges in July, after police allegedly opened fire on a student-led protest and killed a local grocer crossing the street. On Tuesday—less than one week after its new interim government was sworn into office—a Bangladeshi court ordered police to open a criminal investigation into the incident.
• The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) declared a public health emergency over an outbreak of the mostly mild, but occasionally fatal, infectious Mpox virus—a new strain of which originated in the Democratic Republic of Congo and is spreading to nearby nations. Last month, the Africa CDC recorded a 160 percent increase in Mpox cases—and a 19 percent increase in Mpox-related deaths—in 2024 compared to the same 7-month period in 2023.
• Democratic Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland suffered a small stroke over the weekend, his office announced Tuesday. Hoyer, who is 85 and formerly served as House majority leader and minority whip, “has no lingering symptoms” his spokeswoman said, and he is expected to recover. 

To Truth or Tweet, That is The Question

In one of the earlier episodes of the 2024 presidential campaign (approximately 19 years ago), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis decided there was no better venue to announce his candidacy for the GOP nomination than in an audio-only “Space” on Elon Musk’s X. 

As we wrote at the time: 

DeSantis’ pitch to GOP primary voters–“Trump, but competent”—was immediately put to the test yesterday with his campaign launch. … Originally billed to start at 6 p.m. ET, the event—hosted on Musk’s Twitter account—began with eight-and-a-half minutes of silence, eventually interrupted by ear-splitting microphone reverb and followed by whispering from DeSantis. “Now it’s quiet,” the governor said in his first public utterance since he filed the paperwork Wednesday to run for president. … After crash four, five, or six—we lost track—Twitter users hoping to catch the conversation were met instead with some upbeat hold music.

“My Red Button is bigger, better, stronger, and is working (TRUTH!),” former President Donald Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, back in May 2023, mocking “Rob”—presumably a reference to DeSantis, then his chief rival for the Republican ticket—and the launch’s technical difficulties. 

Fifteen months later, however, Trump was sitting there on Monday night trying to do the same thing—hold a “fireside chat” with Musk in a “Space”—only for similar technical issues to flare up.

Their scheduled discussion was delayed by more than 40 minutes, with most prospective listeners unable to join the online group. Musk blamed the snag on a cyberattack meant to overwhelm the servers, though he didn’t provide evidence for the claim. When the pair were finally able to kick off their meandering, two-hour-long conversation, a quirk of the microphone made it sound like Trump had developed a lisp. 

The former president’s live conversation with the electric vehicle baron seems to be part of a recent strategy to maximize media exposure—including a press conference last week—likely to highlight Vice President Kamala Harris’ reluctance to speak to the press since she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee three-plus weeks ago. But the exposure is also shining a bright light on Trump’s apparent concern over the voter enthusiasm that has greeted Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—despite the skeletons Republicans have found in his closet. 

The overwhelmingly friendly conversation with Musk on Monday night played like Trump’s greatest hits reel, punctuated by Musk’s approval or spiels of his own. The former president described the attempt on his life in July—after previously saying he’d never tell the story again. “I didn’t know I had that much blood,” he told Musk. 

The former president spoke with fondness about dictators Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Xi Jinping of China, and Vladimir Putin of Russia. “They’re at the top of their game,” Trump said. “They’re tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious, and they’re gonna protect their country. Whether they love their country—they probably do, it’s just a different form of love—but they’re gonna protect their country. But these are tough people at the top of their game.” President Joe Biden, on the other hand, has “a stupid face.” 

On immigration, Trump signaled plans for a mass deportation of people illegally living in the U.S. and falsely claimed that Venezuela—where autocrat Nicolás Maduro is refusing to relinquish the presidency and is violently cracking down on opposition after losing an election last month—was releasing criminals from its prisons and sending them to the U.S. “We’re gonna have the largest deportation in the history of this country, and we have no choice,” Trump told Musk. 

“If something happens with this election, which would be a horror show, we’ll meet the next time in Venezuela, because it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country,” Trump told Musk near the end of the conversation. “You and I will go and we’ll have a meeting and dinner in Venezuela because that’s what’s happening. Their crime rate’s coming down and our crime rate’s going through the roof. And it’s so simple.” 

The discussion marked Trump’s most significant return to Musk’s site since the previous owner banned him in the wake of the January 6 riots. Musk unbanned Trump’s account when he bought Twitter in 2022, but Trump has mostly preferred to post on his own site, Truth Social—with the exception of August of last year, when he posted his mug shot after he was booked in Georgia on racketeering charges. 

But the hiatus could be ending. Though on Tuesday most of his typical, capital-letter-laden musings have remained the domain of Truth Social, he has tweeted several times in the last 24 hours, mostly campaign videos. And it’s making at least one person close to the former president uneasy. “Look, I love Trump on Twitter,” one Trump confidant told Marc Caputo. “But one of the advantages on Truth Social was that nobody was on there and he could say basically whatever he wanted and a lot of the problematic stuff just didn’t get seen. Now we’re back to old times.”

And perhaps the concern isn’t unfounded. Over on Truth Social, Trump’s posts have recently fixated on the meritless claim that pictures of crowds at Harris’ rallies are generated by artificial intelligence. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote in a post on Sunday. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST! She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane. She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches. This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box.”

Harris has, in fact, been drawing significant crowds at rallies across the country as she and Walz barnstormed swing states last week. And a New York Times/Siena College poll released Saturday showed that some of that sign-waving enthusiasm might one day translate into votes. The poll in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, showed that, among likely voters, 50 percent preferred Harris, compared to the 46 percent who favored Trump. In a race that will likely come down to who wins those three states, polling there can be meaningful. 

Still, even as Harris is delivering her now-standard stump speech, she’s largely eschewed on-the-record questions from the media. 

Those sit-down interviews, which may seem like a mere formality for a politician who spends much of her time talking on camera, can be revealing—as evidenced by the interviews Biden did before he dropped out of the race or Trump’s sit-down with journalists at the National Association of Black Journalist convention when the reporters pressed him on a range of issues. A fulsome appearance before the national press could fill out her as-yet-unknown policy agenda—or remind voters that she’s a notoriously poor impromptu speaker.

Last week, Harris spent just over a minute on the tarmac after a rally in Michigan talking to reporters, and said she wanted to schedule an interview before the end of the month—with no word yet on when that might be and with the Democratic National Convention set to begin in Chicago on Monday. Trump and Harris are set to meet next month in a televised debate on NBC. 

Even as Harris is dodging scrutiny of her policies by elucidating none—or none that Trump doesn’t share, like “no taxes on tips”—her running mate, Walz, is facing criticisms for his record as governor and allegations he embellished his military career and knowingly retired before his troops were deployed. “When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him—a fact he’s been criticized for aggressively by many of the people he served with,” Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate who’s a Marine veteran, said last week. “I think it’s shameful to prepare your unit to go to Iraq, to make a promise that you’re going to follow through, and then to drop out right before you actually have to go.”

As Alex pointed out in a fact check on the site, the reality could be more complicated. The Harris campaign has said Walz “misspoke” when he claimed he carried “weapons of war” in “war,” though on the claim that he deserted his men, it’s unclear that he knew his unit would be deploying before he retired in 2005. Likewise, Republican critics have claimed he inflated his rank, calling himself a command sergeant major instead of master sergeant. “In 2004, Walz was promoted to the rank of command sergeant major (E-9), the second highest enlisted rank in the Army,” Alex explained. “Despite gaining the E-9 rank, Walz retired before completing the rank’s full requirements, so only qualified to receive the retirement benefits of an E-8.”

But as polls turn against Trump, an attack on a seemingly intentional obfuscation may be the best the GOP has going for it, Chris Stirewalt argued. “Calling Walz’s record ‘stolen valor,’ may be grasping at straws,” he wrote, “but in a race that is rapidly getting away from the Republicans, it represents the only tool at hand right now to get the Democrats off their winning game plan.” 

Worth Your Time

• Why should we care about the Olympic games—aside from the United States running away with the total medal count? “The blended ideals of competition and cooperation at the heart of the Games don’t only symbolize the principles behind free governments and free markets,” Walter Russell Mead wrote for the Wall Street Journal. “They embody them. The creative synthesis of competition and cooperation is how democratic capitalism works. The rules of sports such as basketball and tennis exist to make the competition more thrilling and to allow true excellence to shine forth. In the same way, constitutional order allows free competition between political ideas. Similarly, the laws and rules that surround markets exist to allow markets to do their work more efficiently, and to fill the world with an ever-growing abundance of ever cheaper and better goods and services. … The competition has made humanity run faster and jump farther than ever before.”
• Is our world too digitally interconnected? “Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” James Meigs wrote in Commentary. “Personally, my money’s on the blue screen of death. On the morning of July 19, millions of users across Europe went to boot up their computers and encountered that dreaded blue screen known to IT experts by the highly technical acronym, BSOD. … The failures crippled businesses large and small, including supermarkets, banks, and airlines,” he wrote. “The widespread collapse of computer networks this past July was a reminder that vital aspects of our modern life depend on delicate digital systems that even experts don’t fully understand. … When these tightly coupled systems work—which is virtually all the time—they make everything faster and more efficient. For example, the modern electric power grid links together many separate utilities in vast networks. This helps utilities quickly shuttle power to where it is needed. But it also means that problems in any part of the system can rapidly propagate across the entire grid.”

Presented Without Comment

Politico: Walz Defends Military Service Record After Vance ‘Stolen Valor’ Accusation

“I’m going to say it again as clearly as I can: I am damn proud of my service to the country,” the Democratic nominee for vice president said during the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees 2024 convention in Los Angeles. “To anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words: thank you for your service and sacrifice.”

Also Presented Without Comment

Axios: Harris Campaign’s Google Ads Rewrite News Headlines

It’s a common practice in the commercial advertising world that doesn’t violate Google’s policies, but the ads mimic real news results from Search closely enough that they have news outlets caught off guard.

In The Zeitgeist

Do we really need more spy content? Maybe not. But if a show stars Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow, we’ll happily accept the offering. FX’s series The Old Man is set to return for a second season next month. 

Toeing the Company Line

• What’s going on with the riots in the U.K.? Is the enthusiasm for Harris real, and how might it translate to the Democratic National Convention next week? What happens next in Bangladesh? Kevin was joined by Annalise DeVries, Drucker, Charles, and Grayson to discuss all that and more on last night’s episode of Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here. 
• Alex fact-checked claims about infants born alive after botched abortions in Minnesota during Tim Walz’s tenure as governor.
• In the newsletters: Nick explored (🔒) how Harris has thus far managed to position herself as the “change” candidate in the election despite serving as vice president.
• On the site: Kevin argues that it’s folly for Republicans to go after Walz over his military career rather than his policy record, Cole and Aayush report on how college campuses are preparing for students (and protesters) to return in the fall, and Jonah dives into Trump’s insistence on personal attacks against Harris.

Let Us Know

Does it matter to you that Harris hasn’t done more interviews with the media? Is the attack on Walz a fair one?