Happy post-indictment Thursday, Best & Brightest readers. Thanks to Dylan Byers for covering for me yesterday while I had a sinuplasty (noses are weird), and my new colleague Abby Livingston, whose work is so good that it almost makes me want to turn in my Capitol Hill credentials. In tonight’s issue: a deep dive into the history of the conservative anti-D.O.J. complex, how it’s playing out in the current Trump indictment, and why Ron DeSantis could leverage this long-running culture war grudge to his advantage.

But first…

By Abby Livingston

• Schiff’s G.O.P. Defenders: So, after a medium scare, House stalwart, California Senate aspirant, and MSNBC fixture Adam Schiff survived freshman Republican Anna Paulina Luna’s censure attempt yesterday via a 225-196 vote. But the Democrats could not have successfully defeated the effort without the help of 20 Republicans. Per the House clerk, Schiff’s defenders on the right were largely institutionalists—committee chairs and cardinals (Hill jargon for appropriations subcommittee chairs)—and Republicans who have tough re-elections ahead.

  The institutionalists included no fewer than three chairs: Kay Granger at Appropriations, Tom Cole at Rules, and Mike Turner, who in 2022 became the top Republican at Intel when Schiff was chairman and before Kevin McCarthy kicked him off the committee. Garret Graves, whom Politico recently named as McCarthy’s “new fixer,” also voted with the Democrats, along with cardinals Mike Simpson (an old Boehner ally) and Steve Womack.

  The vulnerable members who tabled Schiff’s censure included Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Juan Ciscomani, Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Kean, Jr., Kevin Kiley, Young Kim, Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro and David Valadao. And then there was the curveball: Freedom Caucus member Thomas Massie took issue with the resolution’s call for a $16 million fine against Schiff. Though Massie appeared open to censure if the fine was removed.

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  Teammates Forever?: The Republican baseball team whipped the Democrats 16-6 last night at Nationals Park, extending their winning streak to three games. Freshman Senator Eric Schmitt lived up to the pregame hype—G.O.P. Coach Roger Williams pointed to him as his best new hitter on the team—when he clocked a three-run triple to left field in his debut.

  But the real action, of course, was in the stands, where lawmakers milled about and gossiped. One loyal Puck reader sent me a photo of McCarthy and Kyrsten Sinema hanging out together at the Terra Club V.I.P. section behind home plate, a move that will probably further rile up Democrats who already can’t stand the independent senator. But their friendship dates back to Sinema’s time as a House member, when McCarthy successfully encouraged her to lead a Wednesday morning spin class for members. More recently, the pair dined together this past winter. Supporters of her Arizona Democratic Senate rival, Ruben Gallego, periodically resurface photos from that night on Twitter.

• Booksmart: Yesterday, the literary world mourned the passing of Robert Gottleib, the former editor of both Knopf, the prestige publishing imprint, and The New Yorker (he pre-dated Tina). But Gottleib is most relevant in Washington circles as the longtime editor of Robert Caro. Indeed, he sweated over Caro’s biblically voluminous biographical masterworks about Robert Moses (The Power Broker) and, of course, the multi-part L.B.J. chronology. As most Room Rater viewers well know, Caro completed his fourth volume on Johnson around a decade ago, and is at work on the putatively final edition. Has Gottleib’s death put it in jeopardy?

  One can only wonder, but as news of his passing coursed through Nationals Park last night, conversation turned to Caro and Gottleib’s earlier collaboration on Johnson’s years leading the upper chamber. Master of the Senate, after all, has for years been the only book resting in the reporter’s section inside the Senate chamber’s press gallery.

  Indeed, Caro is a sort of Woodward character in political circles—a writer of such extraordinary bipartisan reverence that many praise the work without actually reading it. (Could they ever make it through those multi-em-dash paragraphs with their short attention spans?) Generally, the Capitol Hill Caro audience breaks down into four camps: the amateurs (who’ve never heard of the book), the strivers (who are still working through it), the phonies (who pretend they’ve read it) and the weary wisemen (when not thumbing through a third reading, they keep their copy on a shelf in view for TV hits).

That’s a tough break for other wannabe candidates, especially when most Republican consultants are warning against attacking Trump, or even staying quiet, lest they aggravate the party’s base. “It’d be political suicide,” a G.O.P. operative told me, noting how former party stalwarts like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were exiled for criticizing Trump after January 6th. “I don’t care if you’re Kevin McCarthy, with $50 million in the bank, or if you’re Marjorie Taylor Greene. It doesn’t matter where you stood before that. You’re gone.”

Nevertheless, over the last few days, Trump’s rivals have been gingerly testing new lines of flaccid quasi-attack as the scope of his legal jeopardy comes into fuller view. Nikki Haley, who initially decried the news of Trump’s indictment as “prosecutorial overreach, double standards, and vendetta politics,” repositioned on Monday after the charges were unsealed, calling Trump “incredibly reckless” in his handling of classified information. Privately, many Republicans confess they share the same concern. As Mike Pence told the Wall Street Journal, “these are very serious allegations. And I can’t defend what is alleged.”

Of course, neither Haley nor Pence are frontrunners for the nomination, and may be banking on the possibility that Trump is convicted or drops out before 2024. It’s a much more delicate situation for Ron DeSantis, the MAGA-baiting Florida governor who is currently second on the primary leaderboard, and has an outside shot at beating Trump in Iowa or New Hampshire—but only if he can win over a meaningful portion of those 61 percenters whose view of Trump remains unchanged. “DeSantis wants to get the Trump supporters to come to him,” explained a well-wired conservative activist, summarizing the dilemma matter-of-factly. “And he can’t do that by being mean to Trump.”

The real question, of course, is whether DeSantis’s calculated MAGA pandering will be enough to appease the Hannity-Tucker-Mark Levin crowd when he is asked to commit to outright pardoning Trump. One conservative communications official I spoke with suggested that DeSantis should prepare a lawyerly, lightly-caveated statement to get ahead of the inevitable, leaning on the Presidential Records Act, poking holes in the espionage charges, opining on attorney-client privilege, and so on, before promising the get-out-of-jail-free card.

Another veteran G.O.P. strategist agreed. “I could even see some yahoo [asking], will you pardon Donald Trump and make him your V.P. and then step aside so he can finish his four years? Absolute utter nonsense, but it would put DeSantis in a weird thing.” The only way to escape ever-more absurd loyalty tests, he posited, was to “take the thing off the table” first. “Say, ‘If they do this, this is political and I would absolutely pardon him, it’s wrong.’”

But at the moment, it seems like everyone, except for ’24 gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy, is nervous about getting out in front of their skis. (Ramaswamy, the indefatigable Y.O.L.O. candidate and green-room regular, was the first to promise a pardon, challenging every other candidate to publicly stake their position.) The Justice Department, after all, may very well have Trump dead to rights on felony charges that could put him in prison for the remainder of his natural life. And as much as MAGA voters love Trump, they also like winning, and there are palpable concerns that multiple trials could consume the front-runner’s campaign. “It won’t blow over; Trump could very likely get convicted,” the activist told me. “Then his people have to land somewhere.” And if there’s anything I know about MAGA voters, if they can’t get Trump, they like the people who stand by him no matter what.” As the comms official put it, “Vivek is showing the way.”

But is he? I admit that I’d fully expected more people to show up to support Trump on Tuesday, as he was arraigned at a Miami courthouse. Trump himself had tried to rally an imposing crowd via several hyperventilating, all-caps posts on Truth Social, while other MAGA-oriented figures like Kari Lake had openly called for people to descend on Downtown Miami. Surely a 37-count federal indictment was the apotheosis of his martyrdom. Surely this threat, which could put him in federal prison, was the MAGA equivalent of D-Day. But no: Trump only summoned hundreds, not tens of thousands, of supporters to the court, according to reporters on the scene, and they were largely of the stunt-pulling, QAnon-Shaman-esque cosplaying, extremely-online variety. (Or, perhaps, the ones that a Republican donor was able to bus in at the last minute.)

Is that diminished fervor, between January 6 and this week, a sign of some hidden delta between Republican sympathy for Trump and full-throated support, with performative outrage filling the gap? If so, perhaps there’s an opportunity for DeSantis to capitalize on right-wing grievances over government overreach, allowing him to come off as magnanimous yet presidential. “Not enough to get him over the top,” predicted the comms official, “but it would show some backbone.”