The Playbook Podcast

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ support for a Florida bill restricting abortion at six weeks of pregnancy shows he’s eager to continue courting the right flank of the GOP. A future problem for him may be in how his position on abortion rights will be received by moderate voters in the 2024 election.

The unveiling of the charges against former President Donald Trump will trigger a frenzied legal battle by Trump and his team to derail the case...here's what we know now. New York legal reporter Erica Orden talks with Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza about her day in court and what's next.

It’s election day in America — at least parts of America. The two biggies? Wisconsin, where tens of millions of dollars have poured into a supreme court race that could flip the balance of power on the court from conservatives to liberals; and Chicago, where a mayoral runoff pits two Democrats against each other. In Manhattan, Donald Trump's expected arraignment will happen around 2:15pm. New York...

A group of House Democrats is secretly crafting a fallback plan to avoid an economy-rattling debt default. The White House wants no part of it. Moderate Democrats in the Problem Solvers' Caucus have spent weeks constructing a break-glass deal with centrist Republicans in case the country goes all the way to the brink on the debt ceiling. As the summertime deadline for action approaches, they’re wo...

At 7:15 last night, Manhattan DA Alvin bragg made it official with this statement: "This evening we contacted Mr. [Donald] Trump's attorney to coordinate his surrender to the Manhattan D.A.'s Office for arraignment on a Supreme Court indictment, which remains under seal. Guidance will be provided when the arraignment date is selected." Even though we’ve long known this was coming, that term — “sur...

BREAKING OVERNIGHT — “Russian Security Service Detains Wall Street Journal Reporter,” by WSJ’s Daniel Michaels: “The Federal Security Service said Thursday it had detained Evan Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, in the eastern city of Yekaterinburg. The FSB said in a statement that Mr. Gershkovich, ‘acting on the instructions of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about...

After weeks talking with his rank-and-file about what concessions they’d need from Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, Speaker Kevin McCarthy floated five proposals that could maybe, just maybe, elicit an agreement. We spent yesterday working the phones to find out what Hill Democrats — both lawmakers and senior aides — privately thought about these ideas. First, a caveat: Don’t expect top Democr...

The Republican presidential primary is shaping up to be a case of déjà vu.  In 2015 into 2016, Donald Trump gained an early lead and never looked back. The hype about a well-funded, twice-elected Florida governor proved to be illusory. Most of Trump’s opponents waited around for someone else to take him down until it was too late. Chris Christie, one of the few Trump opponents who had sharp words...

Good Monday morning from Accra, Ghana, where VP Kamala Harris is kicking off a seven-day diplomatic mission to Africa, aiming to reset relations between the United States and the three countries she’s visiting — Ghana, Zambia and Tanzania — as China looks to deepen its foothold on the continent. Playbook is with Harris as she becomes the latest and highest-ranking administration official to travel...

Even as he faces indictment in Manhattan, Trump has to watch his back on the federal classified documents investigation. The recent courtroom fight over Evan Corcoran's testimony “indicate[s] that prosecutors have continued to build a case and that the inquiry remains a serious threat to Mr. Trump,” per the NYT. Corcoran will testify again today, and the Times reports that he doesn’t plan to plead...

JMart’s latest column is hot off the presses and already blowing up group chats on Capitol Hill: “Sinema Trashes Dems: ‘Old Dudes Eating Jell-O’” As her fundraising efforts plow forward, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) “has used a series of Republican-dominated receptions and retreats this year to belittle her Democratic colleagues, shower her GOP allies with praise and, in one case, quite literally...

On the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, as pro-Trump rioters were ransacking the Capitol in Washington, prosecutors in Manhattan gathered on Zoom to discuss Donald Trump's bookkeeping practices.  More than two years later, while state and federal criminal investigations into Trump’s culpability for the events of Jan. 6 continue, it is the Manhattan probe that is set to produce the first Trump indictment...

Good morning from Orlando, where House Republicans are gathered at a luxury resort not far from Disney World for their annual three-day retreat — and where, we’ve learned, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and senior GOP leaders are preparing demand to testimony from members of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office amid reports of an imminent Trump indictment. This morning, we...

A pair of fresh stories out this morning illuminate two emerging storylines in the early jockeying for the 2024 campaign … White House aides tell us that President Joe Biden is likely to announce a final decision on the 2024 reelection in the coming weeks. And as he gears up for a likely reelection, he appears to be shimmying back to the ideological middle (an easy move when there’s no real primar...

All eyes will be on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen today as she testifies before the Senate Finance Committee at 10 a.m..  Yellen’s appearance was originally scheduled to discuss the Biden budget. But after the weekend rescue of Silicon Valley Bank, this will be senators’ first chance to cross-examine Yellen about the controversial actions she took on Sunday in concert with her colleagues at the...

We’re barely into the 2024 Senate cycle, and already some Republicans are feeling a sense of deja vu.  In a new must-read, our Holly Otterbein attended a rural Pennsylvania rally for Doug Mastriano, the “state’s most MAGA Republican” who also won its gubernatorial primary last year only to lose the general election by double digits to Democrat Josh Shapiro.  Her biggest takeaway: Despite that huge...

House Republicans are set to embark on a multiweek stretch of ups and downs — starting today, with the release of a massive energy package authored by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, aimed at boosting domestic oil-and-gas production, lowering consumer costs and drawing a sharp contrast with the Biden administration’s pivot to green energy.  The legislation will be designated “H.R. 1,” undersc...

If you work at Compass Coffee, Roblox, Vox Media, Etsy, Roku, Vimeo, LendingClub or any of the other companies with deposits at Silicon Valley Bank, you are waking up this morning with welcome news. After a white-knuckle weekend you can be confident that payroll will be met, checks will clear and your company will have access to every cent of its SVB deposits, not just the FDIC-insured limit of $2...

Over the last 24 hours, the dynamics that will define the 2024 Republican primary have begun to come into clear view, as told in three must-read stories: 1. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “has indicated privately that he intends to run for president,” WaPo’s Hannah Knowles and Isaac Stanley-Becker report from Davenport, Iowa. 2. Former President Donald Trump appears likely to face criminal charges in M...

It’s the day all of D.C. has been waiting for with bated breath. Around noon, President Joe Biden will release his proposed federal budget. No one in the White House seriously believes that Congress will adopt it in its current form. In private, administration officials readily admit that they know it’s not going anywhere.  So why does it matter? Beyond the obvious implications for governing, we’r...

A new trove of exhibits unearthed as part of Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News was released on Tuesday, including emails, text messages and transcripts from depositions by numerous Fox News personalities and executives. There are lots of interesting details in the documents that reinforce the allegations made in Dominion’s recent motion for summary judgment. But the main takeaways are...

A prominent Democratic think tank is raising alarms about a third-party ticket spoiling 2024 for Democrats and landing Donald Trump back in the White House. A new two-page memo from Third Way, obtained by Playbook, takes aim at the potential “unity ticket” being promoted by the centrist group No Labels. With tens of millions of dollars in financial backing, No Labels’ stated intention is to nomina...

Our colleague Betsy Woodruff Swan has an eye-popping story up this morning on a previously unreported DHS domestic-intelligence program, “one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO. “Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal. Und...

What’s more important: respecting the principle of D.C. self-governance, or staying on the right side of an explosive national issue? Yesterday, President Joe Biden chose politics over principle. It did not go over well with some Democrats.  In November, the D.C. Council passed a major reform of the District’s criminal code. The legislation was vetoed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, who objected to reduct...

Since Trump’s first appearance at CPAC in 2011, the conference had become an early venue for him to court the base of the Republican Party. Now, the fate of the Schlapp-era CPAC and Donald Trump himself are tied together. The annual event, which began yesterday in National Harbor, has been abandoned by most top GOP elected officials. The annual event, which began yesterday in National Harbor, has...