Happy Wednesday! It was such a pleasure to meet so many of you live and in Technicolor yesterday at the inaugural Dispatch Summit! To make sure you don’t miss our next major event, consider becoming a premium member. You’ll unlock priority registration for all our events, plus three all-access annual subscriptions and ad-free podcasts.
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) tasked with streamlining bureaucracy and cutting spending. Trump described the effort as “potentially, the Manhattan Project of our time.”
- Trump said Tuesday he will nominate South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to serve as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Noem, who was briefly in the running to be Trump’s running mate, was elected governor in 2018 with Trump’s endorsement. If formally nominated and confirmed, Noem would lead an essential department poised to try to follow through on some of Trump’s most ambitious campaign promises, including mass deportation.
- Trump announced Tuesday evening that Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and Army veteran, will be his nominee for defense secretary. Hegseth is the former head of Concerned Veterans for America, a group funded by the Koch brothers that is opposed to military intervention and advocates for reform to the Department of Veterans Affairs but has limited experience with senior-level national security decision-making.
- Trump on Tuesday also announced plans to nominate former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, who is also an evangelical pastor, has been a vocal supporter of Israel and has backed Israeli claims over the West Bank in the past.
- Trump said Tuesday he planned to appoint John Ratcliffe, a former representative from Texas who served as the director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, to be director of the CIA. Trump praised Ratcliffe’s loyalty in his announcement, saying that “from exposing fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation, to catching the FBI’s abuse of Civil Liberties at the FISA Court, John Ratcliffe has always been a warrior for Truth and Honesty with the American Public.” Ratcliffe currently works at a Trump-aligned think tank, the America First Policy Institute.
- Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury—the head of the Church of England— resigned on Tuesday after the release of a report concerning the abuse of boys and young men at church camps in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the 1970s and ’80s. The independent review found that Welby and other bishops effectively covered up “prolific and abhorrent” physical and sexual abuse by John Smyth, a lawyer associated with the evangelical wing of the Church of England, a faction from which Welby also hails. The Crown Nomination Committee—a committee of Anglican clergy, laity, and others—will now offer the name of the preferred successor and a second choice to the prime minister so King Charles III can make an appointment.
- The Associated Press on Tuesday called the Senate race in Arizona for Democrat Reuben Gallego, who defeated Kari Lake, a Republican. Gallego, who served as a Marine in the Iraq War, is the first Latino to represent Arizona in the Senate. The win, in a state that voted for President-elect Donald Trump, sets the GOP Senate majority at 53 seats.
- A Dutch court of appeal ruled Tuesday that Dutch petroleum company Royal Dutch Shell did not have to cut its carbon emissions by 45 percent, overturning an earlier ruling. The decision comes three years after a Dutch court ruled—in a suit brought by Friends of the Earth International—that the company was obligated by a “social standard of care” to reduce emissions. It also coincides with the beginning of the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.
- New York Judge Juan M. Merchan, the judge who oversaw former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial, announced on Tuesday that he would halt the proceedings—until at least November 19—in light of Trump’s recent victory in the presidential election. Merchan was set to rule on Trump lawyers’ requests to throw out his conviction due to the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that granted presidents wide immunity from prosecution for “official acts” taken while in office. Now, Merchan is responding to new requests from Trump’s team to throw out the case in order “to avoid unconstitutional impediments to President Trump’s ability to govern.”
- Gangs in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince shot at a Spirit Airlines flight as it landed in the country on Monday, hitting and injuring a flight attendant on board. The Federal Aviation Administration said that U.S. airlines would be prohibited from flying to Haiti for 30 days. Haiti, which has been gripped by widespread civil disorder and gang violence after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, has suffered even greater spasms of violence since the country’s transitional ruling council said Monday that it had fired Prime Minister Garry Conille over the weekend, as the government and a Kenyan-led force of international peacekeepers struggle to restore order. The new prime minister, businessman Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, was sworn in on Monday, though Conille claims his firing was illegitimate.
- The State Department on Tuesday said that the U.S. government would not limit arms transfers to Israel, after warning Israel a month ago that it would reduce military assistance if the levels of humanitarian aid entering Gaza did not increase. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said that “we, at this time, have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law.” U.N. and German officials warned before Tuesday’s deadline that Israel was not meeting the U.S.-set targets.
- A U.S. jury on Tuesday awarded three former detainees of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq $42 million related to their abuse while in custody between 2003 and 2004. The plaintiffs’ lawyers successfully argued that CACI—a Virginia-based military contractor that employed civilian interrogators—was liable, even if the plaintiffs could not prove direct involvement by the company’s employees.
Taking Stock After the 2024 Election
Four years ago this week, The Dispatch held its first-ever event: two days of virtual programming in the middle of a pandemic analyzing the results of the 2020 election.
Yesterday, a week after President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive political comeback, we had the privilege of welcoming our Dispatch members to D.C. for our inaugural in-person Dispatch Summit. The day featured fascinating conversations about the state of the country and what the second Trump administration could look like with people in a position to know. Look out for many of these discussions to be released to Dispatch members in the coming days. Below is a quick recap of the day.
Reflecting on January 6 and the Future of the GOP With Mike Pence
Former Vice President Mike Pence initially ignored online grumblings about a novel and baseless legal theory that would have given him the power to overturn the results of the election. “I dismissed it out of hand as a student of the American founding all my life,” Pence told Sarah and Steve. “I thought there’s maybe no idea more un-American than the idea that any one person could decide who would be elected president of the United States.”
But the idea didn’t go away in the lead-up to January 6, 2021. Former President Donald Trump seemed to believe Pence could …
As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 2,298-word item recapping The Dispatch Summit is available in the members-only version of TMD.
Worth Your Time
- Substacker Noah Smith has been working through an extensive post-mortem of the Democrats’ defeat last week, and he concludes the series of posts with a detailed case that governance of once-thriving “blue cities” has become a serious liability. “The American urban renaissance is now well and truly over,” he wrote for his Substack, Noahpinion. “In the 2010s and early 2020s, many progressive cities squandered the massive windfall from the knowledge industry boom. With its seemingly invincible network effects and ever-increasing bounty of tax revenues, that boom seemed to convince progressive cities that they had infinite amounts of fiscal and social surplus to dispose of as they pleased — that they could tolerate crime and disorder, spend infinite money, and neglect the need to build new housing, and that none of this would end up mattering. That turned out to be wrong, and now the bill is coming due.”
Presented Without Comment
Business Insider: Costco Recalled Almost 80,000 Pounds of Butter Because the Labels Failed to Say It Contained Milk
Also Presented Without Comment
The Hill: Trump Rally Comedian Apologizing ‘To Absolutely Nobody’
In the Zeitgeist
We’re not sure who, exactly, was calling for a fourth Bridget Jones movie, but to that person: congratulations. You got your wish.
Toeing the Company Line
- On the podcasts: Jonah is joined by Paul Ryan for a live taping of The Remnant at the Dispatch Summit.
- On the site: Grant Mullins pans the overclassification problem and Jonah argues that mandates are stupid.
Please note that we at The Dispatch hold ourselves, our work, and our commenters to a higher standard than other places on the internet. We welcome comments that foster genuine debate or discussion—including comments critical of us or our work—but responses that include ad hominem attacks on fellow Dispatch members or are intended to stoke fear and anger may be moderated.
With your membership, you only have the ability to comment on The Morning Dispatch articles. Consider upgrading to join the conversation everywhere.