Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell, on my way back to Washington from a wonderful week in Sicily celebrating my gorgeous niece Maggie and her new husband, Tony (a chef who owns the must-eat Brown Bag Sandwich Co, near Washington Square Park, for all you New Yorkers). I know I missed a lot of news over the past week, but I’ll be back with some updates from the Hill tomorrow, and a full column on Wednesday. Until then, my partner John Heilemann sat down for a fascinating conversation with David Jolly, a former Republican and “Never Trump” independent, who recently registered as a Democrat and who appears to be on the verge of announcing that he’s running for governor of Florida next year. John and David hash out the ethics of Trump accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar, the business deals shadowing the president’s Middle East trip, and Democrats warming to fighters in their party, regardless of whether they’re far left or moderate or right-adjacent. But first, some notes from Dylan and Bill…

Dylan Byers

Crossfire 2.0: Sam Feist, the lifelong CNN veteran who recently became the C.E.O. of C-SPAN, is planning to bring back a kinder, gentler version of the famed CNN debate show Crossfire—one that aspires toward bipartisan resolution, not Maury-style ideological combat. The show will be called Ceasefire—get it?—a concept, according to the Times, that Feist picked up over a lunch, decades ago, with the original show’s co-host Michael Kinsley.Will this new iteration make a meaningful dent in the market, or even become a phenomenon in its own right? Obviously not! It’s C-SPAN! But, man, you have to hand it to Sam—a lovably earnest, dyed-in-the-wool Washington media insider and party gadfly, the kind of guy who’s spent his entire adult life in the Beltway and is still genuinely thrilled to be at every event on the W.H.C.D. circuit—for at least being passionate enough about this dying industry to still give something like this a try. His old boss Mark Thompson isn’t doing this shit, and couldn’t be bothered to. So, good for Sam. After more than 33 years working his ass off in the service of every CNN president since Tom Johnson, he finally got a chance to play the role himself on a far smaller stage, and is absolutely relishing the opportunity.

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William D. Cohan

Leon Black v. Josh Harris: As readers will remember, former Apollo Global Management billionaire bigwigs Leon Black and Josh Harris are in the middle of an arbitration proceeding, brought by the former against the latter. Presumably, Leon believes that Josh violated the terms of their shareholder agreement some four or so years ago when Leon was in the midst of his Jeffrey Epstein troubles. The arbitration is still ongoing behind closed doors, administered by three JAMS arbiters.Leon, of course, founded Apollo in 1990, after his former firm Drexel Burnham Lambert blew up. Josh, who worked at Drexel, joined Apollo shortly after. Later, when Apollo went public in 2007, Leon decided to bestow upon Josh and Marc Rowan, the current C.E.O., some 58 million shares of company stock, and named them “co-founders” of the firm, even though they were not technically his co-founders. In any event, all three men are now multibillionaires. Josh is also the principal owner of the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia 76ers, New Jersey Devils, Crystal Palace F.C., and he holds a minority stake in Joe Gibbs Racing. Even though the arbitration proceedings are confidential, a small window has opened pertaining to Leon’s view that some of Josh’s advisors failed to address—at least to his satisfaction—a subpoena that had been issued to them as part of the arbitration in the months leading up to Leon’s March 2021 resignation. That dispute has seeped out into New York State court, which can compel the production of the discovery materials, if it ends up ruling in Leon’s favor. Anyway, the subpoena has been made public, and it involves the public relations firm BerlinRosen, now known as Orchestra, which has represented Harris. Leon has asked Orchestra to share information regarding the firm’s interaction with prominent business journalists, including Matt Goldstein at The New York Times; Josh Kosman at the New York Post; Miriam Gottfried at The Wall Street Journal; Gillian Tan at Bloomberg; and Mark Vandevelde, Kaye Wiggins, and Sujeet Indap at the Financial Times, all of whom covered the controversies involving Leon and Epstein, as well as Leon and Guzel Ganieva, a woman with whom he had a years-long, consensual affair, and paid some $9 million of a $21 million agreement to keep quiet. (She breached the agreement in March 2021 on—where else?—Twitter.) Leon is asking Orchestra to produce documents related to these reporters (plus a host of other people) between July 1, 2019, and August 1, 2021. Goldstein was part of the team—along with James B. Stewart, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Kate Kelly—who wrote a story in the Times in July 2019 about the then-incarcerated Epstein’s ties to Wall Street figures, including Leon, as well as Jes Staley, Glenn Dubin, and Les Wexner. Leon has long disliked the media’s treatment of his relationship with Epstein, whom he paid $158 million for tax- and estate-planning advice. And I suspect this subpoena is part of his ongoing effort to figure out whether Josh purposely exploited the media coverage of that relationship to make a play, albeit unsuccessfully, to become C.E.O. of Apollo… [Read More]

And now, John’s conversation with David Jolly…

Confessions of a Never-Trump Florida Man

David Jolly, the former Florida Republican congressman turned independent anti-Trump pundit, has just registered himself as a Democrat ahead of an all-but-certain run for governor of the Sunshine State. He dishes on the Qatar plane deal, the “big, beautiful bill,” and what Dems are actually doing right.

John Heilemann

David Jolly’s political transformation is almost a mirror image of his native Florida. Born in Dunedin, just west of Tampa, and raised in Dade City about an hour north, Jolly won a special election in 2014 to represent Florida’s 13th congressional district—replacing his moderate Republican mentor and former House Appropriations Committee chairman, Bill Young. But in 2016, redistricting made FL-13 dramatically more Democratic, and Jolly lost a close race against the state’s Republican-turned-Democrat former governor Charlie Crist. This was probably for the best: Jolly had started denouncing Donald Trump a year earlier, following Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, and would have been an uncomfortable fit with the president’s MAGAfied G.O.P., and an unhappy camper in the bargain. Indeed, Jolly’s disillusionment with where Republicanism was headed was so deep that he officially left the party in 2018, spending the next seven years as an independent and becoming one of the more prominent and pragmatic Never Trump voices out there. But then, just last month, Jolly re-registered as a Democrat—a move widely and correctly interpreted as one of his final steps ahead of launching a bid for governor of his home state.

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Jolly’s candidacy, and the shape of the campaign he fashions will be worth watching, especially in the context of his new party’s eagerness to forge a path back to competitiveness in Florida—a state that as recently as 2016 was the very definition of a “battleground state,” but that has turned from deep purple to candy-apple red over the course of the Trump era. That’s one of the topics I discussed with Jolly this week on my Impolitic podcast, along with Trump’s unapologetic embrace of out-front corruption in the form of a super-luxury jet gifted by Qatar, his let’s-make-a-deal trip to the Middle East, and, of course, Mike Johnson’s efforts to pass the “big, beautiful bill.” As always, this conversation has been edited for clarity and condensed.

The Plane Thing

John Heilemann: The idea that Donald Trump is using the White House to enrich himself is a commonplace by now. But his eagerness to accept the plane from the Qataris took the out-front nature of that corruption to a new level. Were you surprised to see him so openly on the take? David Jolly: I don’t think anything is surprising in the Trump era. We’ve kind of ripped the Band-Aid off on that. Put me in the Norm Eisen camp—I think it is clearly a violation of the Emoluments Clause; but even if not, it violates standard ethics. The Trump administration this cycle is making some legal arguments that have a whiff of credibility. Even some of the arguments they are making in court about executive authority, birthright citizenship, etcetera—I think they’re all completely wrong, but they’re dressing up these legal arguments to try and defend actions that are really indefensible. The question is, just because you could make an argument in its defense, does that really mean you should? On questions of immigration and due process now, it’s not a matter of right versus left—it’s right versus wrong, and people see it as just wrong to be violating due process, taking people off the streets. And in this case with the plane, I think even if Pam Bondi can write a memo saying, Maybe we can fit it within this legal argument…, the American people see it and say, Wait, I’m not sure I want our country, much less our president, receiving a $400 million gift from a foreign nation-state, because what does that mean we owe them in return?—which is the spirit behind the Emoluments Clause. Even if they dress this up [as a transfer to] the Department of Defense, and then ultimately to a foundation, we know it’s for his personal use. We know it’s a bribe. The American people understand undue influence from a foreign nation. This is where Donald Trump is overusing his capital, and we’re seeing that in his numbers. Do you think ultimately the deal gets done, or that, one way or another, it gets stopped? I’m not sure it gets stopped. I think the question is, what does it look like when we take possession of it? Can it actually be operational during this administration? Is it a gift to the foundation when he leaves office, and that’s the first time we see it? Does it get gifted to Donald Jr. and Eric Trump in some other transaction? It takes us down the real rabbit hole of insidiousness for this president, where a lot of people have their suspicions validated. Does this guy even care if it were to be bugged? Is it, five years from now, some type of deal in the Middle East for the Trump enterprises? All of those questions are fair game, which is why the constitutional restrictions, and the spirit of those restrictions, have been abided by for centuries. Even opening up the lens to these questions of a president’s loyalty is what we’ve tried to avoid through all of American history. The plane story has been playing out simultaneously with Trump swanning around the Middle East. The corruption angle is impossible to ignore in judging the trip, but leaving the plane aside for the moment, what do make of his visit to the region in terms of foreign policy? Donald Trump’s view of foreign policy is one of international business. He performs the role of president on the world stage, not as a secretary of state, but as a secretary of commerce: He pursues deals. So that raises questions of amorality and foreign policy. Are America’s views actually being displayed on the world stage when you turn your head to the Khashoggi incident, or when you go shake the hand of the North Korea dictator, or when you sit with Putin? In Donald Trump’s mind, all of that is justified if he gets business flowing. Other presidents balanced America’s values with commerce and the world economy—Donald Trump has ignored that, and he’s also failed to translate it back home. The last piece that I think has been unsettling about this trip is the level to which he has turned his attention away from Israel, at a time when we know he has privately given the green light to Netanyahu to just continue doing what he’s doing. I’m somebody who would suggest that after October 7, there is no scenario in which Israel does not have a security zone around Gaza to protect its own people. This is not to suggest that Israel is unjustified in fighting and winning the war. But the level at which the war is being executed—for Donald Trump to be parading through the Middle East, talking about his money grab from other nations, and whistling past the graveyard of a war that has such serious consequences, suggests this is a president who doesn’t care. For Trump, it’s all just about getting a $400 million plane, his son getting a hotel deal, and the American people being told that we’re going to have greater international business. I’m not sure that his elusive promise of greater economic benefit to the United States is strong enough to overcome this lack of American values.

A Big, Beautiful Disaster

As a former House member, you know what a challenge it is to get a reconciliation package done. But the “one big, beautiful bill” isn’t just any reconciliation package, it’s a monster. What’s your take on its prospects of getting through the House, let alone to the president’s desk? Truly, for all the years the Democrats took the label, this is Republicans in disarray. Donald Trump confuses the senses a little bit. In a traditional presidency that does not rule by chaos, this would be the entire focus of the national political conversation, and somehow, it’s just not there yet. I think there are two principles in politics that are heading for a collision here. Winning is unifying, even among a caucus that is perhaps in disarray right now; but that’s headed toward a collision with another principle in politics: Math is math—and they only got three votes. In the end, I think they get something done. From my experience, what ends up happening—and the reason I ended up being a no on many Republican bills that I otherwise would have supported—is in the end, even members with integrity invent fake math to get this all done. I think this ends up turning into a giveaway bill to everybody on the Republican side of the aisle, where everybody gets something. And the ultimate accounting of it is where the loss for the American people comes in.

Do you think Speaker Johnson is equipped, in terms of his political strength and as a legislative strategist, to manage the fractiousness and diverse ideological imperatives that are at play in his caucus? For Republicans, he is a capable speaker, not a strong speaker. Some speakers are the stern father, and some are your best friend or your brother. Johnson does not have the strength to make people vote a certain way; it’s just not in his DNA; he will figure out how everybody gets something… After all, Republicans are not the party of fiscal responsibility; Democrats are. That is absolutely true by the facts. And I think what you’re seeing is, the hardliners are afraid to acknowledge and accept that. Republicans, when it is convenient, will blow up the deficit and increase the debt in ways Democrats have never considered doing before. And that’s the tension that Johnson is having to realize. This is where Johnson is not a strong enough leader to change public opinion. He’s just going to roll over and have to accept it, and kind of fade away a little bit in the media cycles. What does it say that Republicans are ignoring almost everything Trump said he wanted on the tax part of the bill—from his recent embrace of raising the top rate on the one percent and closing the carried interest loophole to his campaign pledge to end the taxing of tips? These bills are actually really hard to write and get done. Historically, what you’d see is some type of budget ambassador on the Hill negotiating this the whole time. Donald Trump doesn’t do that. He just goes on Truth Social and tries to be transactional. It’s not the way it works in Congress, even with a president who controls the Republican Party. Donald Trump is terribly concerned about his poll numbers and the economy. Now, Donald Trump is out of touch politically, not just with the country, but with his base. So what can he do? I’m gonna tax the rich, because I’m for the working man. And that leaves Republicans on the Hill saying, Wait a minute, Mr. President, where did this come from? I think Republicans on the Hill would be smart to go along with him. But this is about Donald Trump trying to save Donald Trump, not negotiate a tax bill on Capitol Hill. As a newly registered Democrat, are you impressed with what your new party has been doing in the face of Trump 2.0? I think what Mayor Pete is doing, what Bernie is doing—A.O.C. and others—is responding to the urgency that Democratic voters, and members of the Democratic coalition, are demanding at this moment. This is a very rational Democratic Party right now. This is about how we win, while also advancing Democratic values. I’ve done about a dozen town halls across Florida. And for maybe a third of the audience, this is their first time participating in some level of activism. Trump won in part because too many Democrats stayed at home, but that’s not this environment. Democrats are showing up. We’re also seeing a large number of independents. So this coalition that’s growing is asking for fighters—it’s not a left vs. right vs. middle. It’s about who’s there in the gap fighting for us.

Unique and privileged insight into the private conversations taking place inside boardrooms and corner offices up and down Wall Street, relayed by best-selling author, journalist, and former M&A senior banker William D. Cohan.

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