Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily political dispatch from the Swamp. I’m Julia Ioffe.

I’m currently en route to the Aspen Security Forum, where there has been a flurry of cancellations and changes due to last weekend’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas pulled out because of the investigation into the shooting, as did Liz Sherwood-Randall, the White House homeland security advisor. C.I.A. head Bill Burns is also no longer attending; he is on call in case he needs to go to the Middle East for the umpteenth time to negotiate that elusive ceasefire deal. The morbid joking that these people are missing their last Aspen hurrah has already begun: This time next year, everyone seems convinced, there will be a very different administration in the White House.

That said, there’ll still be plenty of high-ranking and in-the-know folks out there, and I’ll bring you more of the conversation from the Aspen Meadows Resort next week.

A couple of notes before we get going, though…

• The Menendez non-news: New Jersey senator and former chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez was found guilty of corruption today, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer immediately called for him to resign. On any other day, this would’ve been massive news. But the verdict came amid the Trump show in Milwaukee, after the attempt on his life rocked the nation, and amid the interminable debategate aftermath. It seems like Rep. Andy Kim, who came out of D.C.’s national security circles, is now even more of a shoo-in for Menendez’s Senate seat, but to me, the way this news broke—that is, without really breaking through—seems to be a harbinger of things to come: Trump dominating the news so much that everything else, even matters of significant policy and substance, gets subsumed by the rollicking, exhausting circus.

• The Iranian plot: Meanwhile, The New York Times broke the story that U.S. intelligence had been tracking an Iranian plot to kill Trump, revenge for his ordering the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. (John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have been in the Iranian crosshairs for their role in the killing.) This plot was separate from the one that failed on Saturday in Pennsylvania, and I’m convinced that it has to cut in Trump’s favor. What better way to show that he’s tough and feared on the world stage? Biden could really use a favorable news cycle…
• What’s in a word?: I wrote to you last week about all the ink being spilled about “Trump-proofing” the NATO alliance. By the end of the summit, though, I started hearing American foreign policy wonks asking European allies to ditch the term, especially as a second Trump term is looking more and more likely. It alienates a large chunk of the American public, they argue, seems to meddle in our domestic politics, and makes whatever anti-Trump precautions NATO is taking that much more precarious and self-defeating. I mean, if you were Trump and you came into office, wouldn’t you immediately try to undo such policies and strategies? “It’s just painting a huge target on the back of whatever you’re trying to do,” a senior Republican foreign policy aide on the Hill told me. “If you want to really ‘Trump-proof’ it, talk about what’s making the alliance stronger and more relevant.” One proposed term? “Burden sharing.” Boring and bureaucratic, but maybe that would help it fly under Trump’s radar.
• McMaster’s volte-face: J.D. Vance isn’t the only Republican tiger who has changed his stripes. I’m hearing more and more about Republicans in the national security realm who view a second Trump term as inevitable and are adjusting their sails accordingly. One surprising name I’ve heard from two sources is H.R. McMaster. The retired three-star Army general was once Trump’s national security advisor and, for that brief year, he behaved like one of the so-called adults in the room. He publicly clashed with the former president, including when Trump reprimanded him for saying that Russian interference in the 2016 election was an indisputable fact. McMaster was also instrumental in pushing through Trump’s reluctance to send Javelins to Ukraine. (The fact that Trump eventually acceded is now used by his allies to beat back fears that Trump will let his buddy Vladimir Putin swallow up Ukraine.)

  Now I’m hearing that McMaster, who is a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, is hobnobbing with right-leaning tech bros—the Sacks-Musk-Vance crowd—and telling people that Trump wasn’t so bad after all… and that a second Trump term wouldn’t be a disaster. McMaster has a new book coming out about his experience in the White House, at a time when those years feel like a distant memory to most. Is he trying for a bestseller—or positioning himself for another turn in the saddle?

Two recent reports further complicated the tea-leaf reading. On Monday, Politico confirmed widespread suspicions that Pelosi had been working against Biden. And on Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Adam Schiff spoke harshly about Biden’s electoral chances at a Hamptons fundraiser, but stopped short of calling on the president to withdraw. These are, of course, devastatingly significant actions from two of the most consequential Democrats. While not officially in leadership, Schiff’s tenure as House Intel chairman during the Trump years makes him enormously influential among activists.

Schiff, on some level, is at the peak of his powers, having practically walked into the most coveted Senate seat in America. And his political alliance with Pelosi could not be closer. Moreover, the central point of Schiff’s remarks was how much Biden was endangering the down-ballot races. Given that Schiff is all but certain to win his race in the fall, his unstated mission as the California Democratic standard-bearer is to help run up the score to try to pick up the seven House seats that Democrats are targeting this fall and to defend the three vulnerable Democratic-held seats.

It’s notable that the Schiff incident and much of the Pelosi outreach took place prior to the Saturday shooting. Same with Schumer’s Saturday afternoon chat with the president in Delaware, which Schumer described in a statement at the time as “a good meeting.” But the world changed with the shooting, and the rank-and-file are scrambling to figure out what messages their leaders are telegraphing them to follow.

As this drama approaches its fourth week, the whole fight seems to be right back where it started: a stubborn president who will probably only listen to his family, longtime advisors, plus Schumer and Pelosi. And the latter two are both quiet. Meanwhile, an astonishing number of world-class Democratic gossips are uncharacteristically admitting they have no idea what’s next. “I am getting crickets from my friends on the inside, which is freaking me out,” a former Obama official told me. For this group, there are three theories about what’s going on at the top of the party:

• They’ve given up: The first theory states that party elders have reversed course, post-shooting, on their attempts to defenestrate Biden. According to this line of argument, the Democrats no longer have the stomach for this fight, the timeline is too constrained, the tricky optics are even trickier, and risk-averse electeds don’t want to be fingered for tearing the party apart during the fourth quarter of a very consequential election. The suggestion is that Democrats will hide behind their wan public utterances of support—I’m with Joe, yada yada—and pray that the partisan electorate keeps Biden competitive in the race.
• They’re plotting: The second theory floating around is that the assassination attempt on Trump’s life provided a brief pocket of calm in the hurricane swirling around Biden’s political fate. The speculation is that astute and careful party leaders have waited for the media to flee to Milwaukee in order to privately organize an effort to press Biden on his need to put aside his ego and withdraw.
• They don’t have a clue: The last theory is the one that really rattles Democrats and may most closely approximate the truth: The plan is that there is no plan. Democratic leaders are as confused and paralyzed as the rank-and-file amid this bizarre, unprecedented catastrophe. Inertia or cowardice has resulted in an insulated Biden never feeling the full weight of the opposition against him, and the post-shooting pause has given Biden’s campaign the chance to irreversibly run out the clock. But, a plugged-in former Hill staffer told me, “People are still trying. Just because there’s not a plan, doesn’t mean people aren’t trying shit.”

And now for a little more on the stagnating Biden crisis…

And yet, all of this near tragedy may have been great news for Biden himself, politically speaking. Going into the weekend, all the talk in Washington had been about how the 81-year-old president simply had to step aside for the sake of the republic. Two Democratic members of Congress I spoke to were sure that Biden wasn’t seeing the polls they were, and that Biden’s closest advisors—Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, et al.—were protecting him from an overdue appointment with reality.

The Biden campaign pushed back strenuously on these members’ characterization of Biden as a rambling old man, sending me a half-dozen tweets from other call participants, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a fierce Biden loyalist, who said the president was “sharp, forceful.” “Just in the past week, the president has met with Democratic leaders in both chambers and numerous congressional groups to solicit their feedback and answer their questions,” a campaign official said in an email. “Engagement with House and Senate members is ongoing, and the campaign will continue to have candid and robust conversations with congressional offices.”

The campaign did not, however, dispute this next part, about Crow and his Bronze Star. In a video of the Zoom that I was able to view, you can hear Biden chastising Crow, who asked about the importance of national security to voters. “First of all, I think you’re dead wrong on national security,” the president says, the emotion at times garbling his words. “You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who the hell that is! Tell me who put NATO back together! Tell me who enlarged NATO, tell me who did the Pacific basin! Tell me who did something that you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son—and I’m proud of your leadership, but guess what, what’s happening, we’ve got Korea and Japan working together, I put Aukus together, anyway! … Things are in chaos, and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever—”

“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President,” said Crow, “to our voters.”

“You oughta talk about it!” Biden shot back, listing his accomplishments yet again. “On national security, nobody has been a better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me one! So I don’t want to hear that crap!”

“How is this tenable?” the campaign source had asked me on Friday. “We’re in a perfect shitstorm until he steps down or everyone gets back on board.” The Democrats are neither here nor there, neither all in nor all out, neither fully supporting their nominee nor ditching him, a situation perfectly summed up by a Russian expression: a turd stuck in an eddy.

But “the events” in Pennsylvania on Saturday—as they are known in Washington-speak—at least temporarily ended talk that Biden might step aside. “The Biden replacement talk? That’s over,” said a source close to the administration. “I think the assassination attempt took the pressure off for a critical 72 hours. Also, the Hill never got its act together—and death by 270 cuts doesn’t work.”

It is a hope many Democrats are clinging to. In four months, Trump could self-destruct by doing or saying something completely bonkers, though he’s said and done more than enough over the last decade and it never seems to matter. And so they acknowledge that not all those big and unexpected events will cut in their favor. There is a definite possibility, the campaign source said, “that all of them will be bad for us.” Another faltering public performance, for instance, or a health incident could prove fatal to the campaign.

For now, though, the hand-wringing has died down, at least in public, and Biden seems to have emerged intact. “It feels that way for now, absent any public meltdowns,” said one Hill Democrat. “Until the actual delegate count is done, there will be the whispers, stories, etcetera. It’s muted now, but we have a few more weeks before it’s done done.”

Instead, the panic has been replaced by recriminations for the unsuccessful internal coup. “Pelosi and Schumer could have done it if they showed up with 50 folks in their pockets,” said the source close to the administration. “But Michael Bennet can’t lead the charge.” So why didn’t they, I asked? “It’s hard to see the way time is ticking when you’re in the midst of it,” the source responded. “I also think there is still reasonable uncertainty about whether Kamala Harris is a better candidate.” Said the source close to Democratic leadership, “The Dems lack the stones to force him out, particularly the Dems in Congress.”

But it’s not over yet, and as the Hill source suggested, the whispers haven’t stopped, even if Biden has made clear he’s going to white-knuckle this out. “He also said he would drop if he saw data saying he can’t win,” said the campaign source. “He’s about to see a lot of it. The next round of polls will probably be apocalyptic.”

Thanks,
Julia