Trump Tries to Smoke Out Harris With Media Blitz

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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 …

As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our full 1,588-word story on the Trump campaign’s media blitz is available in the members-only version of TMD.

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.