A supposed “gotcha” is really a sad, humanizing portrait of a family working through a difficult time.

Last week, the New York Post began publishing reports on a series of photos, emails, and documents allegedly taken from a laptop hard drive that belonged to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. As it became increasingly clear that the Post was using hacked, unverified information that may have been manipulated by a foreign entity for the purposes of influencing the upcoming presidential election, social media companies started to ban or otherwise attempt to reduce the spread of the Post’s initial story. But the tabloid continued printing information from the hard drive, a copy of which it says it received from disgraced Donald Trump associate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Given that Giuliani and Steve Bannon were the Post’s two sources of information about the hard drive, the provenance of the Rupert Murdoch­–owned paper’s information is more than a little suspect. Giuliani, for one, has said that there’s a 50-50 chance he worked with a Russian spy to dig up embarrassing material about the Biden family. And the computer repair shop owner who allegedly obtained the hard drive and turned it over to Giuliani’s lawyer doesn’t exactly seem like a trustworthy fellow either. So it is with a massive grain of salt that we consider the contents of the hard drive itself. One of the stories contains an alleged text exchange between Hunter and Joe Biden from two months before Joe announced his presidential campaign. It began with a text Joe sent around 7 a.m. to Hunter, who was residing in a rehab facility. “Good morning my beautiful son,” the text reads. “I miss you and love you. Dad.”

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As a foil to the way Trump conducts his personal relationships, the Biden texts are bracingly tender. The current president appears to favor his children in proportion to their loyalty and political utility. He has made multiple public comments on the sexual desirability of one daughter’s body, and he’s allegedly ridiculed the other’s. Trump rushes to disassociate himself from those who reveal any semblance of vulnerability. Even when his wife and son had COVID-19—when it would have been politically advantageous for him to mention his love for them—his public statements were limited to his own condition. He expressed no concern on their behalf.

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Joe Biden’s palpable love for his son is a reminder of what it could feel like to have a love-capable person leading the country again—a person with the capacity for gentleness as well as rage, someone who does not derive his life’s sole satisfaction from self-aggrandizement and contempt. In a time of concurrent national crises, with hundreds of thousands of Americans grieving friends and family members lost to an ongoing pandemic, it could be nice to have someone at the top who knows the value of voicing and acting on compassion. Joe has suffered a great deal of grief—decades before Beau’s death, he lost his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash—and his well-known ability to comfort those in mourning has been called his “superpower.” The alleged texts Joe sent, in addition to his public defense of Hunter, flesh out another, related facet of his family life: his role as a father who showers his son with effusive expressions of love.

The New York Post’s front-page article about Hunter Biden on Wednesday was written mostly by a staff reporter who refused to put his name on it, two Post employees said.

Bruce Golding, a reporter at the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid since 2007, did not allow his byline to be used because he had concerns over the article’s credibility, the two Post employees said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation.

Coming late in a heated presidential campaign, the article suggested that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had used his position to enrich his son Hunter when he was vice president. The Post based the story on photos and documents the paper said it had taken from the hard drive of a laptop purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden.

Many Post staff members questioned whether the paper had done enough to verify the authenticity of the hard drive’s contents, said five people with knowledge of the tabloid’s inner workings. Staff members also had concerns about the reliability of its sources and its timing, the people said.

The article named two sources: Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to President Trump now facing federal fraud charges, who was said to have made the paper aware of the hard drive last month; and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, who was said to have given the paper “a copy” of the hard drive on Oct. 11.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. said that the presence of antibodies in President Donald Trump’s blood could be the result of him taking the company’s experimental Covid-19 treatment last week.

Sean Conley, the president’s physician, said in a memo summarizing the president’s health on Wednesday that detectable levels of SARS CoV-2 antibodies had been found in a sample drawn Monday. Conley said antibodies weren’t detected on Thursday.

Regeneron spokeswoman Alexandra Bowie said in an email that given the volume of antibodies delivered in the company’s cocktail therapy, and the timing of the tests, “it is likely that the second test is detecting REGN-COV2 antibodies.”

Forty-six states have quietly adopted a free way for every voter to track their ballot this year, a potential rebuttal to fears that voting by mail is inherently risky.

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For most states, it's a simple online lookup that shows simple fields for each voter's ballot, like whether it's been sent or received, according to a tally from the National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit that advocates allowing Americans to vote without having to visit a polling site.

Five states, plus several hundred counties, go further. They offer a service that marks every voter's envelope with a unique barcode like a shipped package and lets them receive updates via text message or email every step of the way.

That's a sharp increase from 2016, when only a handful of states allowed ballot tracking of any sort.

DULUTH, Minn. — For a campaign event featuring Donald Trump Jr., the brash-talking, liberal-dunking namesake of the president, it was all rather mundane.

There was no large rally with thronging crowds, but a few hundred seats at a community center, each socially distanced. The signature Trump campaign playlist, usually blared at a volume that makes conversation impossible, was replaced by a selection of library-level soft rock.

“I like the crowds a little bit more packed and a little tighter, but we have to play by different rules, and that’s OK,” he told supporters.

It was not supposed to be this way. If any state is positioned to go from blue to red in 2020, to embrace the fullness of Trumpology and provide the president some much-needed Electoral College insurance, it is Minnesota.