Good morning! If you’re looking for a job right now, the Secret Service is probably hiring. The FBI is "investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination" of Donald Trump yesterday. A Secret Service agent "engaged" with the suspect, who's now in custody, after seeing a rifle barrel poking through a fence while Trump was golfing in Florida.

POLICY

💰 Biden, Trump want sovereign wealth fund

Making fun of trust fund babies is a time-honored tradition. But we all know deep down that having a giant pile of money with your name on it would be awesome. Now imagine one belonging to a country instead of a person.

It’s called a sovereign wealth fund (SWF). It’s a government-owned investment fund and a growing number of countries have one. Now President Biden and Donald Trump want the United States to get in on the action with a Scrooge McDuck vault of our own.

Sovereign wealth funds are common in countries with humongous oil deposits. They’re often funded with cash earned from the sale of those natural resources. Others, like China’s $1.4 trillion SWF, are supplied by the government’s big pile of foreign currency reserves.

• Norway’s $1.6 trillion fund is the biggest. It’s worth $300,000 per citizen and owns 1.5% of the stock in every public company in the world.

• Other oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates also have funds nearing the $1 trillion mark.

What are they for? Uses for sovereign wealth funds vary. Some are used as government piggy banks to smooth things over during bad economic years. Others, like Norway’s, are meant to prep for a future when the oil-backed money tree runs dry.

• On the state level, the Alaska Permanent Fund pays a roughly $2,000 dividend to state residents each year.

• The $52 billion Texas Permanent School Fund dates to 1854. It helps fund K-12 education.

Critics of SWFs warn that SWFs distort markets by their massive size and create conflicts of interest. After all, the government would be regulating the very companies it would be investing in.

• They also point out that, in America, most natural resource-producing land isn’t owned by the federal government. So funding this thing could be a challenge.

The White House has quietly been working on a plan for an American sovereign wealth fund for months. They want to use the cash to make big strategic investments at home and abroad and boost tough-to-enter industries like shipbuilding. They also say it could help finance growth for American companies that are getting hammered by Chinese rivals.

• But it was Donald Trump who blew the lid off this thing. He proposed building a fund to invest in airports, high-end manufacturing, defense tech, and medical research that could eventually “save billions of dollars.”

Aren’t we $35 trillion in debt? Indeed we are. So getting this thing off the ground could be an issue. Neither the Biden White House nor the Trump camp have public proposals yet on how they’ll solve that teeny lil issue.

UNITED STATES

📱 The D.C. Circuit Court will hear arguments today in TikTok v. Garland. That's TikTok's free-speech lawsuit against Attorney General Merrick Garland for the U.S. government’s plan to ban the app. The feds say they’ve got evidence that TikTok is a national security threat. But publicly saying why or showing TikTok’s lawyers why would also be a threat, so they're asking the court to allow them to keep their secrets. Expect a decision in December, just ahead of the January ban.

👗 The government's coming after your $4 pair of TikTok "pants." Right now, certain items worth less than $800 don't pay import taxes and go through less screening by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Biden Administration wants to change that. They say the rule, meant to help small businesses, makes blocking "illegal or unsafe shipments" harder. But it's being exploited by Chinese e-com giants like Shine and Temu. Items using the rule have jumped by more than 7x since 2015.

🕵️ An internal Secret Service investigation into the Trump assassination attempt came to an obvious conclusion: the agency dun goofed. Agents forgot to have local police secure the roof the gunman used. They opted against blocking line of sight from the area. There were radio issues, communication breakdowns, and staffing problems. Three agency executives are goners, though, and the new director says things are changing.

POLITICS

🏛️ Pope Francis is all gas, no breaks

Imagine getting bodied by the Pope. If you’re Kamala Harris or Donald Trump — first of all, thanks for reading — you don’t have to imagine. Pope Francis spoke to reporters aboard his plane, often called Shepherd One. He believes Americans should vote and "choose the lesser evil."

• Don't expect a papal endorsement, though. “Who is the lesser evil, the woman or man? I don’t know,” he added. “Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies." Yikes.

The two campaigns are laying out their strategies as we enter the seven-week sprint to Election Day. The Trump campaign’s three must-win states are Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. For Harris, it’s Wisconsin, Michigan, and… also Pennsylvania.

• Team Trump’s strategy involves trying to mobilize difficult-to-reach people who don’t usually vote. He’s also hoping to win a few typically Democratic Navajo voters in Arizona as part of his Plan B.

• Team Harris is diverging from the Biden playbook and making a play for smaller cities like Eu Claire, Wisconsin and Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Donald Trump won the support of singer Nicky Jam at a rally in Las Vegas. Trump found out who that was live on stage after accidentally introducing the guy as a “she.”

• In a very on-brand move, Trump will speak tonight about the launch of his sons’ new crypto platform, World Liberty Financial.

• He gave Trump Media investors a boost when he said he won't sell his $2 billion in stock when his sell moratorium lifts this week.

• On the policy side, Trump suggested that overtime pay should be tax-free.

Kamala Harris gave her first solo interview as the Democratic nominee. She spoke for 11 minutes to a local ABC reporter in Philadelphia about inflation, guns, and more.

• Harris will be in Michigan on Thursday for a live-streamed rally with Oprah. She’ll follow that up with a swing through Wisconsin on Friday.

• On the policy side, Harris wants to cut the college degree requirements for some federal jobs.

Amid mostly unfounded rumors of Haitian migrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, Trump said he'll deport them all as part of the "largest deportation" ever. The migrants are there legally as part of a federal program, but it's a touchy subject in the area. The city of 60,000 is now home to 15,000 Haitian migrants.

🏛️ Senate: Ex-Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) won some cross-party support from Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) as he fights an uphill battle to win Republicans a Senate seat in deep-blue Maryland.

TRIVIA

Happy early Constitution Day! Tomorrow, September 17, is the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution. At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philly, the delegates who wrote that bad boy signed it and shipped it off to the states for approval.

We’ve got a four-parter today to test your history knowledge. Best of luck to those of us who had to call our high-school history teachers “Coach.”

1. In what year was the Constitution signed?

2. How many people signed it?

3. How old was the youngest signer?

4. Who is known as the primary author?

POLLS

📊 Harris builds national lead post-debate

The post-debate polls are rolling in at high speed. Harris leads in most of them, as she did pre-debate. But comparing pre- and post-debate national polls can provide some context.

• 🔵 ABC News has Harris leading by the same 4% margin as in their pre-debate poll.

• 🔵 Yahoo News has Harris leading by 5% — a big 4% post-debate jump.

• 🔵 TIPP has Harris leading by 4%. That's a 1% improvement since last time.

National polls are good vibe checks. But this isn’t a national election — it’s 50 statewide races (and one in D.C.). Down in the swing states:

• 🔴 InsiderAdvantage has Trump leading by 1% in Michigan post-debate.

• ⚪️ But Mitchell Research has the race tied in Michigan post-debate.

• 🔴 TIPP has Trump leading by 3% in North Carolina post-debate.

• 🔵 InsiderAdvantage shows Harris leading by 2% in Wisconsin.

• 🔵 St. Anselm has Harris up by 8% in the not-really-a-swing state of New Hampshire.

On the voting block side, an NAACP survey has Trump winning 26% of Black men under 50 as he gets the standard Republican 13% of Black voters overall.

🏙️ Local: It's anybody's game in the fight to become the next mayor of San Francisco. A new survey has the top three candidates getting 21%, 20%, and 18% support.

BRIEFS

• China approves 15-year plan to raise retirement ages to 55, 58, and 63

• Mexico amends constitution to force election of all federal judges

• Russia expels six British diplomats accused of being spies

• DirecTV, Dish Network consider combining forces in struggling satellite TV market

• Three Americans sentenced to death in the Congo for alleged roles in failed coup

• Repeal of 1864 Arizona abortion ban takes effect, lifts limit to 15 weeks

• Crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried appeals conviction and 25-year sentence, says judge was biased

QUOTE

ANSWER

1. 1787 — The country’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, came into force in 1781. But it didn’t turn out to be the banger they thought it was. So they opted to try again in 1787, ostensibly to amend the original rather than write a new one. The new Constitution eventually came into force in 1789.

2. The convention was supposed to have 70 delegates, but 15 couldn't make it (imagine being too busy to write the Constitution) and Rhode Island boycotted entirely. Of the 55 who showed up, just 39 signed the document. Many had to leave early and three who weren’t happy with the final text refused to sign.

3. Jonathan Dayton was just 26 years old when he signed the Constitution. He's like the 18th-century version of that Navy SEAL, astronaut, doctor guy. Didn’t work out so well in the long run, though. Dayton’s career went down in flame in 1807 when he got tied up in Aaron Burr's plan to start a new country in the Southwestern U.S.

4. James Madison proved the value of showing up early. He arrived in Philly a cool eleven days early and drafted a blueprint that became the starting point for discussions. He’s known today as the Father of the Constitution. Of course, he’s also only 5’4”, so you can’t win ‘em all.