Harris and Trump Deliver Their Closing Arguments

Happy Wednesday! We’re determined not to get attached to the pair of pandas who arrived at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, considering the state of U.S.-China relations. 

But, if the pandas have a panda baby … does the U.S. have birthright citizenship for large bears? 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories. 

• Several outlets reported on Tuesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Sunday sent a letter to Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, demanding that Israel improve humanitarian conditions in and increase aid flowing to Gaza in the next 30 days or risk the U.S. limiting military aid to Israel. Later on Tuesday, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller confirmed the two Cabinet-level secretaries sent Gallant the letter, but declined to specify potential repercussions. Miller added the letter was sent because, “Ultimately, we did not see our [humanitarian] concerns sufficiently addressed.”
• A terrorist gunman on Tuesday opened fire on a highway near the coastal Israeli city of Ashdod, killing a 33-year-old Israeli police officer and injuring four others. A volunteer ambulance driver shot and killed the gunman. While the assailant has not yet been identified by Israeli authorities, he’s reportedly a Palestinian originally from Gaza who had been living in the West Bank. Israeli police said the shooter reached the highway on foot and opened fire when the police officer—who had planned to get married next month—arrived to check on him.
• South Korea’s military reported on Tuesday that North Korea destroyed sections of roads and rail lines near the border that had connected the two countries. In response, South Korean officials said its forces fired warning shots south of the demilitarized zone along the two countries’ shared border. North Korean state media reported last week that the country’s military intended to block off all connecting routes into South Korea as part of its abandonment of unification. 
• The State Department announced on Monday that an Indian government committee was traveling to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to investigate allegations—which resulted in a June 2023 indictment—that a former Indian government employee last year plotted to assassinate Sikh activist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York City. The committee’s visit comes one day after Canada expelled six Indian diplomats for allegedly targeting Sikh separatists living in Canada. 
• The U.S. and Canada on Tuesday jointly announced sanctions against the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, accusing the organization of being a “sham charity” fundraising for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a U.S. government-designated terrorist group. “Organizations like Samidoun masquerade as charitable actors that claim to provide humanitarian support to those in need,” senior U.S. Treasury Department official Bradley T. Smith said, “yet in reality divert funds for much-needed assistance to support terrorist groups.” Canada went a step further, designating Samidoun as a terrorist organization. The group has sponsored a series of anti-Israel student protests on U.S. college campuses.
• A Georgia state judge ruled on Monday that county election officials in the state have a “mandatory fixed obligation to certify election results,” even when confronted with allegations of election fraud. While officials should report possible fraud if observed, they are nonetheless obligated to count all votes, the judge ruled. “There are no excuses,” Fulton County Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his 11-page ruling. Republican county election board member Julie Adams first brought the case in May after she refused to certify the results of the state’s May primary, arguing alleged voter fraud allowed her to refuse election certification and access to further election information.
• The Department of Transportation (DOT) on Tuesday fined the German-based airline Lufthansa $4 million in civil rights penalties for allegedly discriminating against Jewish passengers in May 2022. Specifically, the federal agency said Lufthansa prevented 128 Jewish passengers from boarding their connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany. A majority of the discriminated passengers wore attire distinct to Orthodox Jewish men, the DOT added. The hefty fine is the largest the DOT has ever doled out for civil rights violations. 

Twenty Days To Go  

On Monday evening, former President Donald Trump was answering questions at a town hall event outside Philadelphia hosted by South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem when there were two medical emergencies in the crowd. Trump requested his staff turn on “Ave Maria” over the loudspeaker while they waited for the pair to receive treatment.

But he wanted the Luciano Pavarotti version.

“Nice and loud, turn it up louder, we want a little action here,” he said as the opening strains of the Schubert classic—this time with the Italian tenor’s vocals—played over the PA system after the two people had been taken out of the overheated venue.

By the end of the song, the former president had decided it was time to chuck it in: “Let’s not do any more questions,” he told the crowd. “Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” 

And so for the next 39 minutes—after some brief interludes of stump-speech greats—Trump was on aux, asking his staff to play some of his personal favorites, including “Time to Say Goodbye,” “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “YMCA,” “Hallelujah,” and “Rich Men North of Richmond” as he swayed, danced, wandered around the stage, and pointed at audience members.

The bizarre episode punctuated the home stretch of a campaign marked by increasingly dark rhetoric from the former president. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris is closing out election season with a media blitz targeted at key constituencies, including some Republicans—though her appearances often reveal a candidate who struggles in unscripted settings. 

With fewer than three weeks to go until Election Day—and hundreds of thousands of votes already cast in early voting around the country—it’s anybody’s ball game. Nate Silver’s weighted polling average shows Harris with an almost 3-point lead over Trump nationally in what has been a remarkably stable race since President Joe Biden dropped out in July. 

The margins in battleground states are also razor-thin: Of the Silver polling averages in the seven key swing states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada—all but one show the race within a point. In Arizona, Trump leads Harris by 1.6 points. Trump narrowly leads in two other states—North Carolina and Georgia—though he’s made incremental gains in all seven in the last week. 

Those gains come despite—or perhaps even because of—Trump’s menacing language directed at immigrants and his political enemies in the closing weeks of the campaign. “How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person,” Trump said last week in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt, referring to figures recently disclosed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “And they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer—I believe this: it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” 

But when asked by Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview that aired on Sunday whether “outside agitators,” would cause violence on Election Day, Trump said there’s a “bigger problem” than illegal immigrants: “the enemy from within.” 

“We have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics,” who could become violent on November 5, he said. “And I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or if really necessary, by the military.” 

In that same interview, he doubled down on his argument that “enemies from within” pose a particular danger to the country. “Well I always say, so we have two enemies, we have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within,” he told Bartiromo, who asked how he would counter “bureaucrats” who would undermine his hypothetical second term. “And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries. If you have a smart president, he can handle them pretty easily. I handled—I got along great—I handled them. But that thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like [California Rep.] Adam Schiff.” 

Harris is seizing on Trump’s words—and the warnings of former administration officials—in an attempt to make inroads with disaffected Republicans, particularly in suburbs, who are hesitant about four more years of Trump. A 30-second ad the Harris campaign released Monday shows clips of the former president’s “enemy from within” line, interspersed with grave warnings from former Trump administration officials Olivia Troye—a former national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence—and Kevin Carroll, a Trump administration homeland security official, warning that “a second term would be worse.” 

Major party presidential nominees often reach out to wavering voters on the other side, if only to boost their numbers with independents who appreciate bipartisanship. But the Democratic nominee’s outreach to Republicans in this race is especially robust, relying on a strategy targeting the millions of GOP primary voters who preferred former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley to the former president. 

That effort will continue this afternoon in suburban Philadelphia, at a location that a senior campaign official described as a spot near George Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. There, the vice president will be joined by “more than 100” Republicans backing her over Trump, including six former members of Congress: Barbara Comstock and Denver Riggleman of Virginia, Chris Shays of Connecticut, and David Trott of Michigan, Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, and Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania.

One particular Harris endorser who wanted to attend today’s event in Bucks County is William Webster, who served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Webster, who turned 100 in March, forwarded a statement to TMD explaining that he was staying away out of concern that the “chilly fall temperatures” might hurt his health, given his advanced age.

“As a lifelong Republican, I stood for the traditional values our party used to represent. I voted for qualified candidates of both parties who shared those values; most of the time they were Republicans. This year, however, I will cast my presidential vote for VP Harris,” Webster said as part of a lengthy statement. “Yes, there are other issues I, like you, care about but without the precious rule of law, our personal freedoms and respect throughout the free world [would] be gravely impacted.” 

“It is no secret that the former president relentlessly spews lies, hate and falsehoods,” he added. “That’s not who we are and certainly not what we should ever want to become!” 

The Harris campaign also seems concerned about keeping key constituencies on her side—particularly black men, normally a reliable bloc for Democrats but among whom Trump seems to have made gains. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, Harris is running far ahead with black voters who are likely to vote, though her support is much softer among black men. 

Her campaign’s efforts to shore up that support haven’t been subtle. Former President Barack Obama has been out on the trail in battleground states admonishing black men for their lackluster support of the Democratic nominee. Harris on Monday proposed a set of new policies to target black entrepreneurs, including one million loans fully forgivable up to $20,000.* On Tuesday, she sat down with radio host Charlamagne tha God in Detroit. 

As the polls have narrowed, Harris has become bolder about her public appearances, including doing conventional media hits on The View, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert—during which she literally tried to be the candidate that you could have a beer with—and 60 Minutes. Later today, she’s recording an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier. 

The blitz hasn’t been without its pitfalls, though. In one version of the 60 Minutes interview released by CBS, Harris’ answer on whether the U.S. had influence over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was garbled. “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” she said in the teaser posted to social media—though the answer that appeared in the final edited edition of the program was much more succinct. 

And asked by a host of The View what she would do differently than President Joe Biden, she responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.” 

Trump—who’s never been particularly camera-shy, it must be said—has nevertheless eschewed several recent opportunities for direct comparison to Harris: He turned down a second debate with the vice president and canceled an appearance on CBS News’ 60 Minutes during which an interview with Harris was also broadcasted. 

But both candidates have taken advantage of the more unconventional medium of podcasts to get their message out to the cord-cutting generation that doesn’t see television ads or late-night TV hits. Earlier this month, Harris appeared on the popular sex and relationship podcast, “Call Her Daddy,” and “All the Smoke,” hosted by two former NBA players. The former has an overwhelmingly young female audience, while the latter appeals particularly to black men. 

Trump, even more so than Harris, has done the podcast rounds in freewheeling conversations with Theo Von, Logan Paul, and on the “Full Send” podcast and the “Flagrant” podcast with Andrew Schulz—all of which have audiences composed mainly of young men. 

But there’s one podcast to end all podcasts that has so far been out of reach for both Trump and Harris: the top-ranked “Joe Rogan Experience” show. Rogan—who boasts more than 17 million subscribers on YouTube—is an idiosyncratic figure who’s been critical of both candidates, though reporting this week suggests both Trump and Harris are actively trying to land an appearance on the white whale of podcasts. 

And though Harris and Trump have their eyes trained on Election Day as they make their final pitches, every one of the next 20 days until November 5 could be Election Day for someone: In Georgia on Wednesday, more than 300,000 people cast their ballots on the first day of early voting, more than double the previous record. 

Worth Your Time

• Talk of a negotiated peace in Ukraine is more about the U.S. than it is about justice or even the end of the fighting, Robert Kagan argued in the Washington Post. “As is so often the case, U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine has been driven by what Americans don’t want,” Kagan wrote. “They don’t want to wind up at war with Russia; they don’t want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on a seemingly unwinnable war; but they also don’t want to bear the guilt and shame of letting Ukraine lose, with all the humanitarian horrors and strategic problems that entails. For all their pretense of ‘realism,’ [former Sec. of State Mike] Pompeo and the other advocates of negotiated territorial concessions promise an outcome that conveniently solves the United States’ problems but no one else’s. The United States can impose its will on a desperately dependent Ukraine, but why must Putin go along? The advocates of peace talks with Russia simply assume that Putin will accept the outcome that best serves American needs.”
• Writing in his Substack, Slow Boring, Matthew Yglesias argued in favor of acknowledging trade-offs. “The desire to ignore tradeoffs is deeply human, and a trait that’s obviously not going away,” he wrote. “That said, I think we are in a particularly bad moment in terms of tradeoffs, due to both the rise of partisan polarization and the recent (lengthy) experience of living in the shadow of a depressed economy.” Even job creation comes with trade-offs. “More people working in the [child] care sector means fewer people rolling burritos or driving Ubers—something is going to end up costing more. A boom in factory construction means labor and materials diverted from homebuilding. Again, that doesn’t mean these are bad ideas, but you do need to think about what’s worth it. In a world with tradeoffs, it’s better to find a way to rewire America that only takes one million workers than one that requires three million. The ‘jobs created’ are the cost; the question is whether the costs are worth the benefits.

Presented Without Comment

Axios: Trump Downplays January 6: “You Had a Peaceful Transfer of Power”

“The primary scene in Washington was hundreds of thousands … and it was love and peace and some people went to the Capitol and a lot of strange things happened there,” Trump said of Jan. 6.

Also Presented Without Comment

New York Times: Mark Robinson Sues CNN Over Report Linking Him to Lewd Comments on Porn Site

In the Zeitgeist

A group of researchers recently discovered a hidden chamber underneath the ancient Al-Khazneh building in the archaeological city of Petra, Jordan. Indiana Jones fans may recognize the stone edifice from the film series’ third installment, where the whip-snapping archaeologist discovered the Holy Grail. 

So imagine the researchers’ surprise when they came across an eerily similar-looking chalice. “All of us just froze,” said Josh Gates, host of Expedition Unknown, who was part of the discovery team. “It looked nearly identical to the Holy Grail featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, set in the ancient building directly above the tomb. It was the ultimate moment of life imitating art.”

Hopefully, they knew better than to bring the chalice past the great seal.

Toeing the Company Line

• What’s the state of The Dispatch? What’s next for the pirate skiff? Is Jonah on a free market jihad? Steve and Jonah answered all those questions and more on a very special five-year anniversary edition of Dispatch Live (🔒). Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here. 
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew sized up GOP Rep. Don Bacon’s chances of survival in his Nebraska swing district, and Nick admitted (🔒) he was wrong and that voters aren’t running away from Trump now that the election is in the home stretch. 
• On the podcasts: Adaam is joined on The Dispatch Podcast by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, senior resident at the Atlantic Council, to discuss public opinion in the Gaza Strip and what Palestinian self-governance will look like. Plus, Scott Lincicome joins Jonah on The Remnant to discuss tariffs and what politicians are getting wrong about them. 
• On the site: Drucker and Warren report that both campaigns are feeling enthusiastic in Pennsylvania, Kevin weighs in on Trump’s musical town hall, and Jonah pans Ta-Nehesi Coates’ bad logic regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Let Us Know

What do you make of the move toward general-interest podcasts as a venue for campaigning?

Correction, October 17, 2024: This newsletter originally mischaracterized the size of the Harris campaign’s proposal regarding forgivable loans for black entrepreneurs.