Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

Tonight’s letter is a dispatch from the other side of Julia Ioffe’s column from yesterday: an examination of how the G.O.P. has leveraged the fight against antisemitism for its own political advantage. As Julia noted, their success in this endeavor is a tactical pivot that doesn’t entirely square with a party led by Donald Trump. Upon closer inspection, however, it makes a lot of sense for the faction led by Mike Johnson.

🚨 Programming note: On May 29 at the French Embassy in D.C., Puck is hosting a screening of For Love & Life: No Ordinary Campaign, a film directed by Christopher Burke chronicling the life and times of attorney-activist Brian Wallach and his wife, Sandra, in the aftermath of his A.L.S. diagnosis. Julia will interview Burke after the screening. (You can, and should, RSVP here.)

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Let’s get started, first with Abby Livingston’s readout on the latest Hill drama…

• McGovern-ing forces: House Republicans banded together this afternoon, using their majority to strike remarks made by Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern about the ongoing Trump hush money trial from the record. “We have a presumptive nominee for president facing 88 felony counts, and we’re being prevented from even acknowledging it,” McGovern said on the House floor. “A candidate for president of the United States is on trial for sending hush money payments to a porn star to avoid a sex scandal during his 2016 campaign, and then fraudulently disguising those payments in violation of the law. … He’s also charged with conspiring to overturn the election. He’s also charged with stealing classified information, and a jury has already found him liable for rape in a civil court.”

  Sure, the incident was far less lively than the A.O.C.-M.T.G.-Jasmine Crockett pyrotechnics during last Thursday’s Oversight hearing. But what was striking about the episode is McGovern’s own outburst: He’s not only a ranking member of the Rules committee, but also the type of old-school member who rarely goes down to the well of the House to rant and rave for the cameras. If he is going for the jugular like this, it telegraphs that more senior Democrats are embracing the pugnacity of their junior colleagues. It’s going to be a long summer…

• Ad wars by the numbers: Earlier today, the House G.O.P. leadership-aligned super PAC laid out its ad reservations for the coming general election campaign. The Congressional Leadership Fund bought $141 million, which is substantially less than the $186 million previously booked by the Democratic House Majority PAC.

  These two groups are taking very different tacks. C.L.F. is concentrating more of its money on fewer races, while H.M.P. is reserving in more markets and more races. Of course, the ultimate composition of candidate/campaign committee/super PAC spending on both sides remains to be seen. C.L.F. has a history of making later buys, and H.M.P. has a history of reserving early and then cutting back. And then there are the ad rates each side is paying, much of which is determined by the timing of the reservations, competition from overlapping Senate (and the presidential) campaigns, and population density in different media markets. We will have a better sense of how much bang for the buck each side is getting in the coming months.

  Zooming out, the C.L.F. is taking dramatic offensive action in massive ad buys against Ohio Democrat Marcy Kaptur, and for the Michigan seat Elissa Slotkin is vacating for her Senate run. It’s offering plenty of air cover for endangered Republican incumbents, but C.L.F. is leaving offensive markets uncovered that were previously thought to have the potential to flip.

• Karlson.TV: If there was a hot second yesterday where you thought Tucker Carlson had struck a deal with the Russian government to broadcast his online show, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking it was true, given Carlson’s history of bashing liberals, praising Vladimir Putin, and extolling the virtues of Moscow subways and grocery stores. Alas, dear readers, it turns out Newsweek misinterpreted and aggregated a report from a Kremlin source, who had said only that Russian state TV was ganking Carlson’s online show from his new streaming service, Tucker Carlson Network, and repackaging it by dubbing Carlson’s monologues and interviews in Russian and slapping on their own branding. (Apparently, Russian entities can just do this without permission from the original I.P. holder, if they’re based outside Russia. Because how would you sue?)

  It’s not the first time that the Russian state media has slopped up buckets of Carlson’s content and repackaged it for their audience—they’ve been doing it since his days on Fox—and there is, seemingly, a small cottage industry of Russians dubbing their favorite right-wing podcasts and shows. Carlson’s C.E.O. Neil Patel refuted the report, saying that TCN “has not done any deals with state media in any country,” and a chagrined Newsweek has updated their story.

Johnson, according to those close to him, hasn’t launched this campaign cynically. A pedigreed member of the Christian Right, Johnson has long been a righteous believer in the concept that defending Israel and the Jewish people is a mandate from God, as I’ve written about recently. But there’s no question that Johnson’s pro-Israel crusade has also had the added benefit of putting his enemies on defense, both on the left and on the right.

House Democrats, for example, are consistently voting against the antisemitism bills, whether because of a perceived First Amendment issue, or language that equates any criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing government with antisemitism. Nevertheless, one senior Democratic aide told me he’s been working overtime to reassure constituents that yes, his boss does support Israel’s right to exist. “What was it Barney Frank said?” he asked rhetorically. “If you have to explain yourself, you’re losing.”

On the G.O.P. side, Johnson’s Israel advocacy has also helped box out the hardliners gunning for his job, such as far-right Christian nationalist Marjorie Taylor Greene (who voted against an antisemitism bill because she was worried it would prevent Christians from saying that Jews killed Jesus) and Paul Gosar, who had signed on to Greene’s attempt to vacate Johnson (and has an unfortunate habit of hiring people fond of antisemitic conspiracy theories). Other Johnson antagonists who have since found themselves on the wrong side of AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Committee, which are deploying many tens of millions of dollars this cycle, include Bob Good and Thomas Massie.

While it’s not clear whether Kevin McCarthy would have done the same thing, Johnson has run harder with this ball than many had anticipated, not only pushing $15 billion in military aid for Israel past the finish line (in defiance of his own party’s hardliners) but also leveraging this cultural flashpoint in the G.O.P.’s favor. According to a source close to Johnson, he’s trying to unite the peevish caucus while drawing a stark contrast with Democrats, particularly as the rhetoric of the pro-Palestine progressive left is skirting into antisemitic tropes. Just this morning, Johnson was publicly weighing action against The Hague after the International Criminal Court charged Netanyahu and the Israeli government with war crimes.

Biden, meanwhile, finds himself trying to hang on to the majority of voters who disapprove of the campus protests against Israel, while somehow placating the progressive Democrats threatening to abandon him in November unless he disowns Netanyahu. If Johnson’s efforts do shift Jewish voters—a historically Democratic constituency with high turnout—toward the G.O.P., it may make a difference come November, and potentially determine control of the House and Senate next year. “This is a decisive group of voters, and they outnumber [Biden’s 2020] margin of victory in every single one of the key battleground states this year,” said Sam Markstein, national political director for the Republican Jewish Coalition. “They're going to be the decisive group of voters in these decisive states. And these issues that we're talking about are going to be top of mind for them this year.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Markstein endorsed Johnson’s strategy of raining antisemitism resolutions down on the heads of Democrats, because it is forcing them to clarify their stance on an extraordinarily difficult topic, especially when it comes to the nuances of supporting Israel while condemning its right-wing government. “If you can’t figure this out—if there really is a quote-unquote, pro-Hamas-sympathizing wing of the party—that should terrify you,” he said. “I would be more worried about that than Republicans putting forward pretty easy votes that should be easy for Democrats to vote on.”