The Playbook Podcast

When Kabul fell to the Taliban several days ago, rocking President Joe Biden's pullout operation, the White House made a strategic choice: They doubled down, didn’t apologize and crossed their fingers that the nation would move on quickly. Now, 13 U.S. service members are dead following a pair of suicide bombs — the first U.S. troops to be killed in Afghanistan in 18 months — as are 95 Afghans. Th...

Today is the kind of day that candidate Joe Biden said he was uniquely prepared for. Congress is gone, domestic policy has been momentarily pushed aside, and global crises are colliding. President Biden awakens to the burden of his promises with a busy public schedule completely focused on foreign policy. He receives an update on the situation in Afghanistan from his national security team in the...

We try our best around here to sift through the competing narratives each day and present our dear listeners with a coherent story. But this is one of those weeks in American politics when it’s best to lay out some possibilities, especially across the three great challenges that President Joe Biden is facing right now: Afghanistan, the Covid-19 pandemic and Build Back Better. Raghu Manavalan is th...

“How dare you?!” … “I’m pissed off!” … "Please, everybody vote for the damn thing.” Those were just some of the choice phrases being thrown around in the House Dems’ caucus meeting Monday night as tensions over the budget standoff between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and moderate Democrats reached a boiling point. The chamber broke shortly after midnight without any deal in place to advance the fiscal blu...

A pair of must-reads on Afghanistan overnight: — A WSJ scoop that casts perhaps the harshest light yet on the administration’s performance, by Vivian Salama: “An internal State Department memo last month warned top agency officials of the potential collapse of Kabul soon after the U.S.’s Aug. 31 troop withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the d...

Republicans universally agree that President Joe Biden's bungled handling of the Afghanistan pullout has given them fresh ammunition to attack the commander in chief. Many Democrats think the same. But a major rift is starting to emerge in GOP messaging, as the Donald Trump wing of the party seeks to turn the matter into a base appeal with anti-immigration rhetoric. Over the past week, most GOP la...

President Joe Biden's average approval rating is below 50% for the first time this year. 538: 49.8% … RCP: 49.4% The dip has been driven by a slow erosion among independents that seems tied to the Delta surge and predates the problems in Afghanistan. It also may be inevitable. FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley: “We don’t know the range in which Biden’s approval will ultimately settle, but if the...

Before President Joe Biden took the podium to address the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan on Monday, senior Obama White House advisor David Axelrod was on CNN giving him some free advice: “You cannot defend the execution here. … This has been a disaster,” he said. “He needs to own that failure. … He’s the commander in chief.” As Axelrod said after, Biden did anything but. Even as he asserte...

Every biography or deep profile of President Joe Biden emphasizes his stubbornness, the chip on his soldier, his lifelong desire to prove doubters wrong — whether it was overcoming a stutter, or demonstrating his intellectual bona fides or entering political contests the experts said he couldn’t win. This is what the right gets wrong about Biden. Many conservatives see Biden’s Afghanistan blunder...

Zach Montellaro, a POLITICO campaigns reporter and expert in (among other things) redistricting, writes in with a special dispatch today: Thursday brought the Census Bureau’s long-delayed release of redistricting data — the granular demographic data that mapmakers across the country will use to redraw political boundaries for the next decade. And while it’ll take some more number-crunching before...

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the House back from summer recess Aug. 23 to vote on the party’s $3.5 trillion budget, but she has a problem: Six moderate House Democrats, our ace House reporters Sarah Ferris and Heather Caygle report, have indicated that they’ll oppose the fiscal blueprint unless the speaker puts the Senate-passed BIF up for a vote at the same time. The speaker can lose only thre...

We have liftoff. Early this morning, in a 50-49 vote along party lines, the Senate passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution that outlines the Dems’ policy agenda. We stayed up late watching the Senate vote-a-rama, the long and free-wheeling debate over amendments to the budget resolution. The vote-a-rama is meaningless in some ways. The amendments — as well as the underlying resolution — are all n...

It’s about time. After months of haggling, the chamber is expected to pass the BIF today at 11 a.m., then move fairly quickly to consider Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer indicated late Monday night that he thought both sides would agree to forgo the 50 allowable hours of debate. That would allow the chamber to start their vote-a-rama today and get out of t...

Days after Mitch McConnell's political flacks complained about our reporting detailing the GOP leader’s concerns about Herschel Walker running for Senate in Georgia, CNN has a story confirming the scoop and adding to it. McConnell, it turns out, is so worried about the former NFL star and Donald Trump favorite becoming the GOP nominee that he’s seeking other candidates. And, it’s been nearly eight...

Chuck Schumer is about to double-dog dare Mitch McConnell and his members to vote against a debt ceiling increase this fall. Just weeks after the minority leader implored his counterpart to tack a debt ceiling increase on to their party’s massive reconciliation bill — lifting the $28 trillion borrowing cap without any GOP votes — Schumer instead is maneuvering to make Republicans squirm. The tenta...

Mike Carey might have been on the ballot, but in the Buckeye State on Tuesday night Donald Trump was just as much the winner. The former president’s candidate prevailed in a 10-way primary to replace former Rep. Steve Stivers, showing that the “Trump influence waning” narrative last week was premature. For the second time in recent weeks, progressives came up short. Our Ally Mutnick, reporting on...

The two special election primaries for Congress in Ohio today offer windows into each party a little more than six months into President Joe Biden's tenure — and Donald Trump's post-presidency. And, for a while now the hottest ticket in town has been an invitation to Sen. Joe Manchin's houseboat. He’s entertained top White House officials like Ron Klain, but mostly he’s used the boat to bring toge...

All eyes are on the Senate again this week. On Sunday night, a little past 9 p.m., the bipartisan infrastructure bill finally hit the Senate floor. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced the legislation with these momentous words: “I call up the Sinema-Portman substitute amendment!” OK, maybe it doesn’t read as momentous on the page, but we watched it live, and after weeks of delay — and a comic...

Sen. Krysten Sinema is not letting BIF or the reconciliation bill get in the way of her summer plans. When Chuck Schumer announced earlier this month that he might keep the Senate in session into August — delaying a previously scheduled recess in order to shepherd the two gigantic bills through the chamber — Sinema told the majority leader that she was not sticking around to vote, multiple Senate...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to flip the chamber in 2022. But one potential obstacle keeps coming up time and again: multiple Donald Trump-inspired candidates who might sweep their GOP primaries but go on to lose in the general election. Take Georgia: While Trump is all but begging NFL legend Herschel Walker to run against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, McConnell views Walker’s p...

In the special election runoff in Texas’s 6th District, Jake Ellzey defeated the Trump-endorsed candidate, Susan Wright. It's a pretty rough outcome for Trump in a district where his super PAC spent over $100,000 last weekend, according to the Dallas Morning News. And, this was the week we stepped back in time when it comes to masks, and ditched carrots for sticks when it comes to vaccinations. Ex...

This is going to be an all-around tough day for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — and to a large degree, it’s a self-inflicted predicament. The House’s Jan. 6 committee makes its debut this morning. And, for the first time across dozens of high-profile Trump-related oversight hearings, Republican leadership and allies will have no voice on the panel. Raghu Manavalan is the host of POLITICO's...

Earlier this year, two of the most unlikely pairings in America started on a journey that we here at Playbook have been watching closely: Bennifer and BIF. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck's first clandestine meetings were reported in the spring. Around that same time, some Republican senators began quietly meeting with their Democratic colleagues to discuss infrastructure. Both reunions were so imp...

No matter what happens to BIF, Pete Buttigieg has already won. The Iowa caucus winner-turned-Transportation secretary has redefined the backwater Cabinet position where Democrats typically plant their obligatory Republican senior official and vice versa (e.g. Obama/LaHood, Bush/Mineta). Buttigieg has assumed celebrity status in D.C., a mainstay of Playbook “spotteds”: In the past six months we’ve...

It should be among the most important oversight investigations Congress has ever conducted. But the select committee on Jan. 6 hasn’t even had its first hearing and it’s already consumed by drama after Speaker Nancy Pelosi decision to reject two GOP appointees, Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. And, we told you Wednesday about how GOP leaders are going on offense against Biden’s $3.5 trillion reconc...