Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, and a very happy Third Indictment Day to you. (My, how the grand juries fly by.) In a world where being an alleged criminal seems to do wonders for one’s political capital on the right, it might seem foolish to continue wondering whether the Ron DeSantis campaign can survive through the end of this year. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. And maybe it won’t because of something that has nothing to do with the news cycle of the day…

Before that, a few thoughts on Trump indictment No. 3…

1. We know how this goes: By now, we’re all more than familiar with the typical Republican grassroots response to a Trump legal jam: the former president jumps on Truth Social to rant angrily and encourage surrogates to adopt his spin; his campaign immediately blasts out a fundraising email or five; small-donor donations start pouring into their coffers like Niagra Falls; and, a week or so later, Trump extends his lead over his rivals in the G.O.P. primary. Meanwhile, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and especially Ron DeSantis, given yet another opportunity to highlight Trump’s political baggage and offer a contrasting message, are forced to equivocate about prosecutorial overreach. Expect nothing different.
2. What about Biden?: The go-to Trump strategy after each of his (three!) indictments has been to accuse Democrats of political persecution and hypocrisy: of course corrupt Joe Biden would lean on the Justice Department to cover for his corrupt, money-sponging failure of a son while turning Jack Smith loose on his predecessor and 2024 opponent. The message has potency in conservative media circles. As one longtime Republican insider and former DeSantis supporter noted to me, Trump’s post-indictment bumps are magnified when the campaign can juxtapose his legal peril with Hunter’s comparative impunity. “It just reinforces the narrative in the minds of Trump supporters that there are two standards of justice, essentially,” he told me. “For folks like Hunter Biden, they’re gonna get a misdemeanor, and they’ll basically get a slap on the wrist and there’s nothing to see here.”
3. Watch the grift: In the aftermath of this latest indictment, one phrase that I’ve heard echoed among Republican operatives and strategists is “watch the grift”—referring to the inevitable phenomenon that somewhere in Trumpworld, some advisor or consultant or friend will find a way to funnel the latest post-indictment windfall into their own pockets. Of course, the Trump campaign is in on the action, too, selling $47 limited-edition, commemorative “Stand with Trump” t-shirts. Nevertheless, I’m told, most voters aren’t fazed. “People think all politicians are all basically corrupt, Democrats and Republicans,” the high-level Republican insider told me. “If they hear about Donald Trump and people around him making all kinds of money off of the campaign, they say, Well, yeah, they’re all politicians and that’s what they do.” After all, he continued, they figure “Trump’s our guy, and in the end, he’s doing it and fighting for us.”

And now for Abby Livingston’s congressional readout….

By Abby Livingston

• CCTV Tirades: Rep. Bryan Steil, a Wisconsin Republican, announced that he reached out to the Capitol Police to obtain footage of a reported incident involving fellow Wisconite Derrick Van Orden’s profanity-laced tirade last week against a crew of Senate pages loitering in the Rotunda. Steil, the chairman of the House Administration committee, sprung into action after yet another Wisconsin member, Democrat Mark Pocan, sent him a letter questioning Van Orden’s fitness for office and formal request that the video be released.

  During a local radio appearance, Van Orden brushed off the ongoing, bipartisan outcry, speculating that criticism of his behavior was a function of the pages being “politically connected” and describing his f-bomb-laden rant as defending the dignity of the Capitol rotunda. “I’m not going to apologize for making sure that anybody, I don’t care who you are and who you’re related to, defiles this House,” he said. “That can’t happen on my watch, man.”

• G.O.P. Gender Gap: Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics released a new study that could foreshadow the future gender makeup of Congress. The group—which tracks statistics around women in public office—discovered that while Democratic women have reached near-parity with 48 percent representation in state legislatures, Republican women still lag far behind, making up only 20 percent of the G.O.P. state-level representatives. (The study also found that Nevada has the highest female representation in both parties, while West Virginia was at the bottom for Democratic women and Delaware ranked last among Republican women.) All of this matters because state houses are frequently a pipeline for future members of Congress: Things don’t get better at the federal level if they’re not improving downballot.

Worse, in a primary that requires Trump’s rivals to distinguish themselves, anyone with a hope of winning the ’24 nomination has been forced to sympathize with Trump’s legal predicament, if not take his side. “It’s hard to separate yourself when you agree that your political opponent is being politically persecuted,” a source familiar with the DeSantis strategy acknowledged. In a perfect world, the DeSantis campaign would be executing the “reset” it promised donors after weeks of gut-punch headlines: slumping poll numbers, out-of-control spending, sputtering fundraising, spooked donors, mass layoffs, the Generra Peck versus Jeff Roe blame game, etcetera. Instead he’s spending his time talking about purging the Justice Department—and still getting labeled a squish.

It’s a humbling fall from grace for a candidate who cruised to re-election in Florida last November by a whopping 19 points and then vowed to “Make America Florida.” But several DeSantis allies close to the campaign told me that’s precisely the problem: DeSantis, at his core, is still running a Florida gubernatorial campaign, not the national presidential campaign he needs to win.

The tactics that made him successful in 2022 worked on a smaller scale: icing out the mainstream media and only talking to conservative blogs; writing ads and raising funds using in-house staff to keep out gossipy Trump weevils; standing behind podiums in his governor’s windbreaker; relying on his policy knowledge and intuition instead of listening to outsiders. But on the national level, repeating this formula has, instead, made him look downright provincial. Exacerbating matters, the insider said, is that the only person he truly listens to is his wife—the Republican Hillary to his Bill, sans pantsuits—who also works at a Florida scale.

DeSantis often considers himself the smartest person in the room, according to people who know him, and sometimes he is. But it is precisely that attitude that is hampering his ability to grow as a candidate, a source familiar with the campaign told me. “When you’re running a presidential [campaign], especially as a first time candidate, you almost need to approach it like you don’t know everything, and that there’s nothing more important than the institutional knowledge of those on the ground or those who have done it before,” he explained. “And I think that that’s not really the DeSantis way.”

“His command over the state of Florida—meaning his depth of knowledge on policy, the depth of his institutional knowledge, on the political demographics of who is where, what issues they’re facing and how government can be used to help drive through his agenda—was second to none,” the source continued. Indeed, DeSantis’s in-depth knowledge of the Florida political landscape, built over decades, was so granular that with minimal preparation, he could drop into a local town, visit the correct coffee shop, immediately tailor his message, and leave with everyone feeling heard.

DeSantis obviously lacks this political command in other states, but then again, so does every other candidate who’s ever visited a Pizza Ranch in Iowa. But retelling the story of how he fixed Florida—and was really, really good at it—is nothing but a nice anecdote to the average voter. Even DeSantis’s basic bio—something that even semi-politically-conscious Florida voters are aware of—has gotten lost in the shuffle, based on the extremely two-dimensional measuring of someone’s name recognition. “The polling would say that people knew who he was, because they know who Ron DeSantis is,” the source lamented. “They know he was the governor of Florida. They know he did a good job and they know he was right on Covid. But they don’t know the rest of it.”

For instance: everyone in Florida knows that Ron DeSantis has three children under the age of six, and that Casey survived breast cancer. But does a random voter in New Hampshire even know he’s a father? Unless they’re constantly looking at DeSantis meme pages on Twitter, probably not. “You really do need that introduction, even if you’re well known,” the source close to the campaign added. “It creates a personal connection between the candidate and the electorate and sets up a basis for you to go back to them and say, I want to tackle this issue and here’s why.”

As I’ve written before, Casey’s role in the DeSantis machine goes far beyond that of a traditional political spouse: she weighs in on everything from speech writing to hiring, strategy to messaging, all while remaining behind DeSantis and never taking the spotlight. However, at the scale presently required of the DeSantis campaign, Casey may have to relinquish control and step into the spotlight, defining herself as more than just a Jacksonville morning show anchor with a penchant for overdressing.

That, at least, was the takeaway from Republican strategists after a recent interview on Fox News, alongside her husband, where Casey not only captivated audiences by discussing her cancer diagnosis (and breaking down in tears over keeping the news from her children), while delivering a well-executed clapback at snotty nicknames from the mainstream media. “I know that a lot of observers said she did amazing,” the insider said. “He needs to get her out there and she needs to be a more prominent surrogate for DeSantis because, for all the discussion about his lack of people skills, which is true, Casey is amazing with people and she just comes off as genuine, real, relatable. He’s increasingly realizing that he needs to leverage her popularity.”

The question then becomes whether the DeSantii would be willing to allocate her time towards campaigning and away from running the rest of the campaign itself. Campaign members, political spouses especially, can be effective—but only when they’re deployed strategically in something as unwieldy as a presidential campaign. Add to that the reality that the DeSantis campaign is running on duct tape and memes, and the decision-making surrounding what to do with their limited time becomes much harder. “You’ve got to really, like, get in and do it the New Hampshire way, and the Iowa way and the South Carolina way,” the source familiar said. “You can’t just campaign here and there.”