The Daily 202: Republican convention offers apocryphal quotes amid revisionist history

Contrary to her “preconceived notion,” the 37-year-old explained, “they were warm and caring, they were hard workers, and they were down to earth.”

“I often think back to my 24-year-old self, driving alone in my car from North Carolina to New York City, and I think about what I would tell myself now as we head towards the most critical election in modern history,” Lara Trump continued. “This is not just a choice between Republican and Democrat or left and right. This is an election that will decide if we keep America America – or if we head down an uncharted, frightening path towards socialism. Abraham Lincoln once famously said ‘America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.’ While those words were spoken over 150 years ago, never have they been more relevant.”

Lincoln never said this. Historians agree it is an apocryphal quote. Snopes and PolitiFact have traced it to a Facebook meme that went viral last year.

Amazingly, this is not the only fake Lincoln quote that has been cited during this week’s prime-time programming.

On Tuesday night, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R) talked about growing up 15 minutes from Lincoln’s birthplace. “Lincoln said that ‘any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure,’” Cameron continued. “Sadly, there are some who don’t believe in this wisdom or in the better angels of our shared American history, as they tear down the statues of people like Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass and even Mr. Lincoln himself.”

“This quote pops up frequently but does not originate with Lincoln,” said Christian McWhirter, a Lincoln historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, in an email to Brent Griffiths. “The earliest occurrence I’ve located is actually from a speech given about Lincoln in 1911 by Hugh Gordon Miller.”

Cameron’s campaign team responded to the mistake not with a correction but with a statement of defiance: “In researching inspirational material for the speech, our team found this quote attributed to Lincoln in numerous places. The sentiment rang true and is one that General Cameron feels deeply.”

Lincoln, the first Republican president, was a touchstone of the program. During her speech on Wednesday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) even compared Trump to the 16th president. “History chooses its heroes for the time in which they live,” she said. “At our founding, [James] Madison was one of the chosen. When the nation’s very existence was challenged, it was Lincoln’s turn. He was alarmed by the increasing disregard for the rule of law throughout the country. He was concerned for the people that had seen their property destroyed, their families attacked, and their lives threatened or even taken away. Sound familiar?” Noem gave Trump a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore with his face added alongside Lincoln’s when the president visited the monument in her state last month. “Thanks to these men, America is a land of hope,” she said.

North Carolina congressional candidate Madison Cawthorn also invoked Madison and Lincoln when he took the stage a few minutes later. “I just turned 25,” he said. “When I’m elected this November, I’ll be the youngest member of Congress in over 200 years. If you don’t think young people can change the world, then you don’t know American history. … Abe Lincoln was 22 when he first ran for office. James Madison was 25 when he signed the Declaration of Independence.”

But Madison did not sign the Declaration of Independence – at 25 or any other age. Cawthorn sought to clean up his mistake by tweeting: “I ad libbed that line and meant to say James Madison was 25 when the Declaration was signed. Arguably my favorite founder. After speaking all of that truth … I was afraid the fact checkers were going to get bored. I wanted to give them something to do.”

This explanation does not add up. Organizers sent out an embargoed script of the speech before it aired with the inaccurate Madison line. Why would it matter how old Madison was when an amazing event happened?

Peddling apocryphal quotes is a Trump family tradition. White House aide Ivanka Trump, scheduled to introduce her father on the South Lawn tonight, opened a section of her 2017 book on how to “Lead with purpose from any level” with a made-up quote from President John Quincy Adams that sounds nothing like anything he would have uttered. She claimed our sixth president said, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” Ironically, the president tweeted the same fake quote in 2015.

Other quotes during this convention have been accurate but devoid of critical context. Lara Trump’s husband, Eric, invoked Ronald Reagan during his Tuesday speech to the convention. “Ronald Reagan’s quote ends with this simple warning: ‘One day we could spend our sunset years telling our children … what it was once like in, the United States, where men (and women) were free,’” Eric Trump said. “Under President Trump, freedom will never be a thing of the past. That’s what a vote for Donald Trump represents.”

That quote comes from a 1960s speech by Reagan denouncing John F. Kennedy’s proposal for what would, a few years later, become the Medicare program. “Seems like if you’re going to make the case that Democrats are going to enact policies that destroy America, maybe you shouldn’t invoke one of the most popular programs of the last half-century and show that past claims about socialist nightmares were extremely overblown,” said Princeton history professor Kevin Kruse.

Indeed, when appreciated in context, Eric Trump invoking Reagan’s dire warnings against Medicare implicitly undermines the sky-is-falling, doom-and-gloom warnings that a Joe Biden presidency would somehow destroy America. There has been a lot of that going on during this week’s convention.

“You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Vice President Pence warned in his speech on Wednesday night at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. “Biden would be nothing more than a Trojan horse for a radical left.”

Former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz questioned Biden’s faith, calling him “Catholic in name only,” because he supports abortion rights. Mick McHale, a retired Florida police officer who heads the National Association of Police Organizations, accused Biden of turning “his candidacy over to the far-left anti-law enforcement radicals” and warned: “Your choices are the most pro-law enforcement president we’ve ever had or the most radical anti-police ticket in history.” 

The study of history, in some ways, is a never-ending fight over national memory. But while people are entitled to have their own interpretations, they are not entitled to their own facts.

Pence’s national security adviser Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general, spoke poignantly during the convention about being in the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists crashed a hijacked commercial airliner into the building. “I lost friends there that day,” Kellogg said. 

This was notable because Trump has recently offered praise for congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene. The president called her a “future Republican star” after she won a GOP runoff this month in Georgia for a solidly red House seat. Greene is an adherent to the QAnon conspiracy theory and has peddled 9/11 conspiracy theories. In 2018, Greene referred to “the so-called plane that crashed into the Pentagon,” adding: “It’s odd there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.” After these comments were widely reported, she tweeted on Aug. 13: “Some people claimed a missile hit the Pentagon. I now know that is not correct. The problem is our government lies to us so much to protect the Deep State, it’s hard sometimes to know what is real and what is not.”

The president has invited Greene to attend his acceptance speech at the White House tonight:

“We will make America great again, again,” Pence said in his speech. 

At least one of the women who became a U.S. citizen on TV did not know she would be a part of the Republican convention. “Neimat Awadelseid had looked forward to the moment she would become a U.S. citizen for years — but she never dreamed her naturalization ceremony would happen at the White House. Even after she received a call inviting her to the White House for the ceremony, she did not know the president would be there until moments before it began. Nor did she know that it would become a featured segment of the RNC,” Jose Del Real reports. “Awadelseid said she did not mind that the ceremony had been featured in a political format. The spectacle, she said, did not diminish the uniqueness of being sworn in as a citizen in one of the country’s most iconic settings. ‘That is the world we live in now,’ she said.” She declined to say for whom she would cast her first vote in November. 

The GOP convention used video showing rioters in “Biden’s America.” It was actually from Spain. The Republicans used footage from protests that broke out in Barcelona after Spanish courts sentenced Catalan separatist activists to prison, BuzzFeed News reports. The footage is for sale on Shutterstock, where it’s described as “Young rebel riot revolutionary anarchist.” The video is part of a pattern of the Trump campaign misrepresenting foreign images, including from Thailand, Ukraine and Russia, and trying to pass them off as American.

Black voters are being targeted in disinformation campaigns, echoing the 2016 Russian playbook. “The potency and persistence of the racial playbook was highlighted this week when Twitter deleted an account featuring a profile photo of a young Black man claiming to be a former Black Lives Matter protester who switched his allegiance to the Republican Party,” Craig Timberg and Isaac Stanley-Becker report. “The account, @WentDemtoRep, offered an online testimonial Sunday … and was retweeted 22,000 times. … ‘I’ve been a Democrat my whole life,’ the tweet said … ‘I joined the BLM protests months ago when they began. They opened my eyes wide! I didn’t realize I became a Marxist. It happened w/o me even knowing it. I’m done with this trash. I’ll be registering Republican.’ Twitter suspended the account and several others that posted similar messages for violating rules about ‘platform manipulation and spam.’ … In dozens of cases, the text from the original message was pasted directly into tweets of other accounts.” 

After a three-year onslaught against LGBTQ rights, Trump is suddenly trying to reach out to the community. “Mr. Trump’s advisers are suddenly talking about L.G.B.T.Q. people as they scramble to find new voter support. Last weekend, the campaign announced the L.G.B.T.Q. coalition that had been expected in June, blaming the delay on the coronavirus,” the Times reports. “Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LBTQ civil rights group, responded, ‘We’re not taking the bait.’”

Election security officials see no sign of a foreign threat to mail-in voting, even as Russia and China continue trying to interfere in the election. “We have yet to see any activity intended to prevent voting or to change votes, and we continue to think that it would be extraordinarily difficult for foreign adversaries to change vote tallies,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said in remarks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. (Devlin Barrett) 

Robocalls from Donald Trump Jr. are urging Republicans to vote by mail. People are are receiving these calls even as his father continues to rail against mail-in voting as an invitation for fraud. “Voting absentee is a safe and secure way to guarantee your voice is heard,” Trump Jr. says in the calls. (Politico)

Over 100 former staff members for the late John McCain endorsed Biden. The signatories range from chiefs of staff in McCain’s Senate office to junior aides on his campaigns. Most are still Republicans. “We have different views of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party platform — most of us will disagree with a fair amount of it — but we all agree that getting Donald Trump out of office is clearly in the national interest,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime chief aide and speechwriter. (NYT)

The traditionally conservative Chamber of Commerce is poised to endorse nearly two dozen freshmen House Democrats for reelection, a move likely to trigger a revolt within the organization and among some of its donors. It reflects the Chamber’s expectation that Democrats will hold the House. (Politico)

TikTok chief executive Kevin Mayer resigned as a U.S. ban on the popular app approaches. Mayer, a former Disney executive, only survived in the role for three months. In a letter to employees, he said “the political environment has sharply changed” since he accepted the role in May, Rachel Lerman reports. Trump issued an executive order this month announcing that the app will be banned in the U.S. beginning the week of Sept. 20 because of national security concerns due to the company’s Chinese ownership. TikTok sued the administration on Monday.

“The storm made landfall at 1 a.m. near Cameron, La. about 35 miles east of the Texas border. Images from downtown Lake Charles, La., showed flying debris and buildings with their windows blown out, as local officials warned residents to remain indoors.The storm, which leaped from a Category 1 on Tuesday to a high-end Category 4 Wednesday night, packed 150 mph peak winds when it crossed the coast,” our colleagues report in a live blog. “Laura was beginning to unleash a swath of destructive winds when it made landfall, with ‘catastrophic damage’ expected, according to the National Hurricane Center, along with widespread power outages. Hurricane-force winds could extend well inland over western Louisiana and East Texas on Thursday morning.” Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) said he had activated the entire Louisiana National Guard to help with hurricane response. 

“The National Hurricane Center urged residents to treat [Laura’s] extreme winds like a tornado. ‘The safest place to be during a major landfalling hurricane is in a reinforced interior room away from windows,’ it wrote. … Heavy thunderstorms embedded within Laura’s core may also spawn tornadoes, and several tornado warnings are active in southern Louisiana.” 

As the hurricane continues to move north along Louisiana’s western border and into Arkansas, its wind speeds will slow, but heavy rains and strong gusts still threaten to cause damage today and tomorrow. Flooding caused by a “catastrophic” storm surge up to 40 miles inland in southwestern Louisiana may continue for several days before the displaced water fully recedes. A National Ocean Service tide station in Calcasieu Pass, La., recorded a water level rise of 9.19 feet during the storm surge. (Katie Shepherd)

• Hurricane Laura’s ferocious winds, storm surge could be ‘unsurvivable’ along Texas, Louisiana coast. Residents fled Lake Charles and Port Arthur, Tex., as the National Weather Service predicted that high tide combined with a potentially historic storm surge could push dangerous waters as far as 40 miles inland. (Ashley Cusick, Maria Sacchetti, Marisa Iati and Andrew Freedman)

“Critically ill patients have been transferred from hospitals and frail patients are out of nursing homes in Jefferson County, Tex.,” Lenny Bernstein reports. “‘There comes a moment when you’ve prepared the best you can. It’s beyond your control, and you adapt to it as it comes,’ said Ryan Miller, chief operating officer for Christus Southeast Texas Health System … Masks are universal and accommodations allow for social distancing, he said. About 30 patients with covid-19 … are being kept separate from others. …  At the Medical Center of Southeast Texas in Port Arthur, … officials have transferred about 65 percent of patients to hospitals further inland … That includes patients from intensive care units, some of whom were unconscious and on ventilators because they were receiving treatment for covid-19.” 

Plans for evacuations were complicated by the pandemic. 

“Officials in coastal states most affected by the hurricane season have had months to prepare for the summer’s storms. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced shelters and buses would be stocked with hand sanitizer and face masks and shelters would be spaced appropriately. Abbott also said 200,000 hotel rooms would shelter evacuees from Southeast Texas, effectively isolating groups rather than gathering people in a large shelter. But with limited space to social distance, capacity for shelter ran out in some areas,” Meryl Kornfield reports.

“Police in Antioch, Ill., about 20 miles southwest of Kenosha, said they had arrested Kyle Rittenhouse in the killings. The Antioch resident was charged with first-degree intentional homicide in Wisconsin, authorities said, but they did not specify whether he was being charged in one fatal shooting or both,” Mark Guarino, Mark Berman, Jaclyn Peiser and Griff Witte report. “The shooting came as self-declared militia members and armed counterprotesters have appeared in the city, which is reeling from days of unrest. … [Rittenhouse’s] social media feeds contained messages supporting the police and photos of himself with assault rifles. He had been a member of cadet programs for local police and fire departments.”

Kenosha became the latest locus of anger over police brutality after police shot Jacob Blake, a Black father of five, seven times on Sunday. The Wisconsin Department of Justice identified Blake’s shooter as Rusten Sheskey, a seven-year veteran of the police department. Blake’s shooting has led to days of peaceful mass demonstrations but also damaging riots in which businesses have been looted and burned. Armed militias have descended on the town. Some wielding AR-15-style rifles took position near stores and businesses saying they intended to fill a vacuum left by a law enforcement. Cellphone video from before Tuesday night’s shooting showed police officers thanking armed civilians for being on the streets after curfew and handing them bottles of water.

Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis told the media that the three officers at the scene have been placed on leave during the investigation. The Wisconsin Department of Justice said that a knife was found in Blake’s car after he was shot. The agency did not say if any of the officers at the scene saw the knife or knew it was there. “Witnesses confirm that he was not in possession of a knife and didn’t threaten officers in any way,” a lawyer for Blake’s family said. Authorities have not released more information about the shooting. 

Miskins appeared to partially blame the victims of Tuesday’s shooting because they were breaking curfew. “Everybody involved was out after the curfew,” he said. “The curfew’s in place to protect. Had persons involved not been in violation of that, perhaps the situation that unfolded would not have happened.” The names of the shooting’s victims have not been released. 

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) said he’s increasing the state’s National Guard contingent in Kenosha to 500 troops. Trump, on Twitter, said he would “be sending federal law enforcement and the National Guard to Kenosha.” There were no other specifics. Pence said in his speech: “Let me be clear: the violence must stop — whether in Minneapolis, Portland, or Kenosha.”

“The online call to arms was urgent: ‘Armed Citizens’ were needed to protect Kenosha. ‘Law enforcement is outnumbered and our Mayor has failed,’ a new group calling itself the Kenosha Guard wrote, summoning gunmen to confront racial justice protesters in Wisconsin. ‘Take up arms and lets defend our CITY!’”Joshua Partlow, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Mark Guarino report. “The guns showed up … Militia-style groups and their sympathizers have become a regular fixture in the United States this summer, appearing at dozens of events and confronting racial justice protesters. Experts who track militia activity have been warning that the proliferation of powerful weapons in untrained hands during tense protests is a recipe for bloodshed. … The Kenosha Guard, which called on people to bring guns to Tuesday’s protest, denied on Wednesday that it had any connection to Rittenhouse. … Andy Berg, a member of the Kenosha County Board of Supervisors, said that although he doesn’t support looting or property damage, the Kenosha Guard is ‘agitating the situation.’ ‘If they wanted to be law enforcement, they should have put their application in and gone through the hiring process,’ he said.”

• Rittenhouse was in the front row of a Trump rally in January, BuzzFeed News reports: Rittenhouse’s social media presence is filled with him posing with weapons and offering support for the president. Footage from the Des Moines, Iowa, rally on Jan. 30 shows Rittenhouse feet away from the president, in the front row, to the left of the podium. He posted a TikTok video from the event. He had written “Trump 2020” and “bruh i’m just tryna be famous” on his TikTok biography.
• A review of 27 deaths linked to either protests or subsequent violence since late May indicates that those ultimately alleged to be culpable, in cases where a suspect or perpetrator were identified, were almost never actually part of the protest movement, Philip Bump reports.

“The politically calculated warnings of Trump and the Republican Party about chaos enveloping America should Democrats win in November are reverberating among some people in Kenosha,” the Times reports. “In Kenosha County, where the president won by fewer than 250 votes in 2016 … some voters who were less sure of their choice said the chaos in their city and the inability of elected leaders to stop it were currently nudging them toward the Republicans. And some Democrats, nervous about condemning the looting because they said they understood the rage behind it, worried that what was happening in their town might backfire and aid the president’s re-election prospects. Yet the situation in Kenosha remains extremely fluid.”

This is a seminal moment in the history of sports. Thursday happened to be the fourth anniversary of the first time that then-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand during the national anthem to protest racial injustice. He was an outlier then. His act of protest derailed his playing career. Now it’s become something close to a consensus position among Black athletes across professional sports.

“The NBA’s restart inside a restricted bubble at Disney World, which has proceeded smoothly for more than a month without any positive novel coronavirus tests, came to a screeching halt Wednesday when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to take the court for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake,” Ben Golliver reports. “The unprecedented decision to postpone the games was quickly followed by a similar decision by the WNBA … In Milwaukee, the Brewers announced they would not play their Major League Baseball game Wednesday night against the Cincinnati Reds. The Seattle Mariners’ game against the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ game against the San Francisco Giants also were postponed. …

“‘Black Lives Matter’ is painted in bold letters on the courts, and players are wearing words and phrases calling for social justice on the backs of their jerseys. But the sentiment has pivoted to anger and despair since the Blake shooting Sunday night. Lakers forward LeBron James issued a powerful postgame statement Monday, saying, ‘Quite frankly, it’s just f—ed up in our community.’ James’s remarks were followed Tuesday by Clippers Coach Doc Rivers, who said, ‘It’s amazing why we keep loving this country and this country does not love us back.’ … 

“The Bucks’ decision not to play in Game 5 of their first-round series caught league and team staffers by surprise. The Bucks’ players, who were dressed in their game uniforms as if they had arrived at the arena ready to play, remained inside the locker room with their coaches, General Manager Jon Horst and other team personnel for more than three hours before emerging to demand justice for Blake from Wisconsin politicians. … The National Basketball Players Association held a meeting Wednesday night to discuss next steps, including whether to continue play or to cancel the balance of the postseason, which is scheduled to run through mid-October. … The Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers, two of basketball’s top contenders, voted against finishing the postseason at the meeting … while a majority of the teams present voted to continue. …

“The Bucks franchise has had multiple incidents with police brutality and racial profiling in recent years. Bucks guard Sterling Brown sued the city of Milwaukee after he was injured during an incident with police, and former center John Henson spoke out publicly after he was denied service by a Milwaukee jeweler. … A group of Bucks players turned out for a July protest in Milwaukee with T-shirts that bore some of George Floyd’s last words, ‘I can’t breathe.’ … Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul (D) held a brief phone call with the Bucks on Wednesday to explain how the Wisconsin process works. Kaul’s agency is investigating Blake’s shooting … 

“On Tuesday, the Detroit Lions canceled practice and players addressed reporters huddled around a whiteboard reading, ‘The World Can Not Go On.’ All but one of the six Major League Soccer matches were postponed after one or both teams decided not to play. … Naomi Osaka, a two-time Grand Slam tennis champion, announced that she would not play her semifinal match in the Western & Southern Open in New York, a U.S. Open tuneup, hours after winning her quarterfinal. A few hours after Osaka’s announcement, the sport’s organizers said play at the event would be paused Thursday … The 22-year-old is the highest-paid female athlete in the world, having brought in more than $37 million in prize money and endorsements last year … ‘I don’t expect anything drastic to happen with me not playing, but if I can get a conversation started in a majority White sport I consider that a step in the right direction,’ Osaka wrote on Twitter. ‘Watching the continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police is honestly making me sick to my stomach.’”

“The new guidance — introduced this week, without any announcement, on the CDC website — replaces advice that everyone who has been in close contact with an infected person should get tested to find out whether they had contracted the virus. Instead, the guidance says those without symptoms ‘do not necessarily need a test,’” Amy Golstein and Lena Sun report. “The revised guidelines come as Trump has feuded with the CDC and the FDA, both parts of the Department of Health and Human Services … On Wednesday, Brett Giroir, an assistant HHS secretary who oversees testing, denied the impetus for the shift came from the White House. He said the idea of altering the testing guidance originated with him and CDC Director Robert Redfield … A senior administration official … confirmed that Giroir launched the effort. Redfield was initially skeptical, the official said, ‘but then came along to it.’ … ‘The truth,’ [the official said] ‘is that people are getting tested who don’t really need to get tested. You are taking a test from someone who actually needs it and is at a greater risk.’” 

Giroir told reporters that he and Redfield discussed the idea with all the task force’s physicians, including Tony Fauci and Scott Atlas, a new member who has juice with Trump. “All the docs signed off on this . . . before it got to a place where the political leadership would have ever seen it,” Giroir said. He said the task force debated the change for about a month before approving it last Thursday.

But Fauci said the decision to change the testing guidelines was made while he was in surgery. In an interview with CNN, Fauci said he was “under general anesthesia in the operating room last Thursday and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding these new testing recommendations. . . . I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact, it is.” 

At least three Democratic governors said their states won’t follow the new CDC guidelines. “This will not be the policy of the state of California,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a tweet. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said the guidance would cause his state “to miss thousands of new cases and allow the virus to spread in our communities.” On Twitter, he urged: “If you’ve been exposed to a confirmed case, GET TESTED.” And New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called the change “indefensible.” “We’re not going to follow the CDC guidance,” he said.

• Another million people applied for unemployment last week for the first time, the Labor Department said this morning, down slightly from 1.1 million the week before. All told, 27 million people are receiving some form of unemployment assistance. (Eli Rosenberg)
• Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell announced a major shift in the way the central bank aims to achieve maximum employment and stable prices. Speaking at the Fed’s yearly Jackson Hole policy conference, Powell put an emphasis on achieving full employment. As the Fed debuts a lengthy review of its monetary policy framework, the Fed concluded that inflation could run a bit over its 2 percent target if that means more Americans stay in the workforce. (Rachel Siegel) 
• The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to reinstate a rule that requires women seeking medication abortions to visit doctor’s offices or clinics, a requirement that a Maryland federal judge lifted because of the pandemic. (Robert Barnes)

Meadows said “the administration is eyeing executive action to prevent airline furloughs in absence of a deal with Congress on new coronavirus relief legislation,” Erica Werner, Lori Aratani and Jeff Stein report. His comments “came a day after American Airlines said it would furlough or lay off some 19,000 workers starting in October unless the federal government steps in with billions more in relief for struggling airlines. Delta Air Lines also intends to furlough nearly 2,000 pilots effective Oct. 1, according to the pilots’ union. ‘I think everybody every time they hear that we’re going to do executive actions they don’t believe me,’ Meadows said. ‘We’ve got four executive actions that actually the president took, we’re going to take a few others. Because if Congress is not going to work, this president is going to get to work and solve some problems.” (It would have been unimaginable for Meadows, before he became a Trumpist, to be advocating for the use of executive power to tell companies who they can and cannot lay off.)

• A third of schoolchildren worldwide – about 463 million – are unable to access remote learning, UNICEF said. (Antonia Farzan)
• Researchers believe a woman evacuated from Italy in March contracted the virus on her flight back to South Korea – most likely in the airplane’s bathroom. (Farzan)
• Three Maryland nursing homes face six-figure fines for infection-control deficiencies that inspectors say placed residents in “immediate jeopardy” during the pandemic. The fines range from $120,000 to $294,000. At least 78 residents from the three facilities died of covid-19 since the spring, according to state data. (Rebecca Tan and Rachel Chason)
• Arlington, Va., will begin enforcing social distancing ordinances again after a rise in cases. The action comes as officials say some restaurant and bar patrons have responded with “open defiance” to police and security personnel. (Patricia Sullivan) 
• Chemical experts are questioning the EPA’s emergency approval of a disinfectant that it said would kill the virus on surfaces for up to a week. “It would be great if this was a miracle solution, but it’s not,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There’s plenty of risk here and too much we don’t know about how this chemical could actually harm people.” The cleanser is, for now, will be used by American Airlines and two sports clinics in Texas. Experts say the cleanser might actually harm passengers and flight attendants and do little to protect against the virus. (Steven Mufson and Meryl Kornfield)
• Four sleep-away camps in Maine prevented the virus from spreading among more than 1,000 people, according to a CDC report. The camps tested staff and campers before and after arriving and made them quarantine. Masks and physical distancing were employed, as well as extensive cleaning and disinfection. The camps offer a contrast with a Georgia camp, where 260 children and staffers were infected in less than a week. (Lena Sun)
• College parties are driving the growing number of cases in North Carolina, officials said. On Wednesday, North Carolina State University announced the closure of residence halls and ordered most students to leave campus by Sept. 6. The university has reported 24 clusters across dorms, off-campus housing and Greek houses. State health official Mandy Cohen said recent clusters could increasingly be traced back to gatherings of recently-returned students or athletes. (Antonia Farzan) 
• Virginia Tech’s football game against North Carolina State is being postponed after 22 members of the Wolfpack’s athletic department tested positive. (Gene Wang) 
• Nearly 2,000 Cornell students signed a petition to have Jessica Zhang, a freshman and a TikTok star, expelled because she flouted coronavirus rules and partied with a crowd. (Hannah Knowles)

Fox News host Tucker Carlson is under fire and facing another advertiser boycott for saying this after a 17-year-old allegedly shot into a crowd of protesters in Kenosha:

A CNN correspondent flagged a claim in Pence’s speech as problematic:

After his convention speech, the vice president walked a rope line with no mask and fist-bumped people: 

Another former Trump official at DHS is speaking out, warning in a new ad that Trump is making the country “less safe”:

Biden’s campaign will debut a two-minute television ad on broadcast and cable networks during the convention program tonight. “It portrays the 77-year-old candidate as a vibrant and quick-paced campaigner at a time when Republicans are trying to paint him as a washed-up politician who is showing his age,” Annie Linskey reports. “The narrator says that some people ‘race up steps when others take it slow’ as a video shows Trump making an unsteady descent on a ramp after giving an address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in June. That’s juxtaposed with video of Biden jogging up a similar ramp, from an address he gave at the academy.” Watch it here first:

In an interview with Stephen Colbert, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned Republicans not to underestimate Biden: 

Trevor Noah talked about the shooting of Jacob Blake: