Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest.

Salutations! Tina Nguyen here, with something a bit different this week for The Best & The Brightest. Since Trump is still the frontrunner and the Republicans still haven’t elected a Speaker (there you go, that’s your daily update), this seems to be a perfect week to take a break from the noise and examine a growing, consequential, and somehow juicy feud inside the right-wing think tank world over who, exactly, gets to be in the Trump administration…

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest on Capitol Hill…

• Death by a Thousand Nos: CNN’s Melanie Zanona posted a delicious piece of reporting on Wednesday afternoon perfectly characterizing the uniquely acute agony of the situation. “Some of Jim Jordan‘s opponents tell me they’ve been purposely staggering their ‘no’ votes over multiple ballots—a strategy designed to show Jordan’s speakership opposition is only growing,” she noted.

  It’s probably not that unusual for members to regularly vote against one’s beliefs on the House floor, but to brag about it? That is some kind of vulcan chess amid an increasingly volatile situation. And this was not a mere procedural matter—this was a deeply personal vote for the Speaker of the House. Members’ yes votes (and their subsequent no votes) will forever be enshrined on the record.

  Or perhaps Kay Granger, Don Bacon and 18 other Republicans took a risky and lonely vote on Tuesday and their colleagues learned that there was life after crossing the hardliners. This sorta feels like the last kid to jump on the desk in Dead Poets Society taking the same amount of credit for bravery as Ethan Hawke’s character.

• Oh, McHenry: Since Congress returned from summer recess, one recurring name in my conversations with House Republican operatives has been speaker pro tempore, Patrick McHenry. First elected in 2004, he’s long been a behind-the-scenes fixture and leader in the conference.

  These conversations inevitably home in on McHenry’s competence—not a word frequently used in conversations regarding any other House Republicans in leadership roles right now. It’s my sense that even if Kevin McCarthy had not selected him as speaker pro tempore, McHenry would still be in consideration to lead the House long term.

  Even a Democrat who served on the Financial Services Committee, which McHenry now chairs, described him glowingly on Wednesday afternoon. That’s not to say he is moderate, or lacks in partisan instincts—in fact, he’s tangled on very personal terms with Elizabeth Warren. In a separate incident, McHenry so incensed Bill Pascrell that the Democrat demanded that McHenry apologize “to all of New Jersey.” But unlike McCarthy, there is at least a baseline of trust between Democrats and McHenry.

• Fog of War: As unstable as the climate is on the Republican side of the chamber, Democrats continue to show total unity in this speaker’s fight. That said, tensions over the war in Israel are escalating. Most recently, Rashida Tlaib posted (along with reputable news outlets) on Tuesday allegations that Israel bombed a Gaza hospital. On Wednesday, after both Joe Biden and the top members of the Intel committees all stated that Israel did not attack the hospital, Tlaib still kept her post up.

  In a veiled response, Josh Gottheimer wrote: “Erroneous reports and some Members of Congress took the word of Hamas terrorists as truth following the horrific Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing. They should remove their posts, update their headlines, and remember not to trust terrorists who brutally murdered innocent civilians.” Without the Republican chaos, this would be the story on Capitol Hill, and this discord probably isn’t going away.

Project 2025, a semi-secretive undertaking of the Heritage Foundation, and the America First Policy Institute, a collection of Trump administration all-stars and hangers-on, are already blueprinting and fantasy-drafting the future right-wing administration of their dreams. Whereas Heritage had started laying out the groundwork for Project 2025 two years ago to staff a “turnkey” operation for whichever Republican won the nomination—notably, they announced the Project’s existence at an event headlined by Ron DeSantis—AFPI was specifically built as a sinecure for Trump loyalists. “It’s basically the Trump administration in exile,” a conservative insider told me.

As these two groups see it, the first Trump administration promised a dream scenario: a fame-loving president who was unusually politically malleable, and whose diehard fandom was as right-wing as it came. If there were any complaints from this crowd, it wasn’t the Muslim Ban or January 6 but rather that Trump and Trumpism were stymied and slow-rolled by recalcitrant bureaucrats and pesky civil servants.

Naturally, now they want to replace them with a ready-on-day-one army of trained political appointees and a clearly-defined ideological action plan. “In 2017, on Inauguration Day, President Trump put about 500 people in the field. Fast forward four years later, on January 28, 2021, President Biden placed about 1,200,” said Doug Hoeschler, Trump’s former director of Intergovernmental Affairs and the Chair of AFPI’s Transition Project. “Biden signed 19 executive orders in the first 48 hours. And President Trump in the first 48 hours signed… one.”

On some level, Project 2025 represents a conservative unity effort I’d long thought impossible. Just about every prominent right-wing organization I’ve followed over the past ten years—the pro-life groups and student activist armies; the Midwestern think tanks and right-wing magazines; the Tea Party Patriots, the Family Research Council, Stephen Miller’s legal firm, Moms for Liberty, you name it—has put aside their differences and are collaborating, a rare feat in an era where Republicans can’t even come together to pick a House Speaker.

But of course, there had to be one exception: The America First Policy Institute, featuring the ghosts of Trumpworld past (Kellyanne Conway, Hogan Gidley, Larry Kudlow, Pam Bondi, Linda McMahon, Matt Whittaker, Chad Wolf, etcetera), which is dedicated to preserving and promoting the Trump Agenda. “It’s pretty much everyone except them,” a person familiar with Heritage’s efforts complained. “They’ve been invited, but they refuse to join.”

On September 20, AFPI formally launched their own presidential transition project, focused on putting together their own personnel list of proposed appointees to staff the next administration, as well as their own list of proposed executive actions. “Preparing for the next America First administration is too much work for any one organization or even two,” Hoeschler told me.

Both groups largely share the same goal of placing the “right people” inside the next administration, whether it’s under Trump or someone else (but let’s just say it’s Trump). But who precisely is on those shortlists is worth going to war over. Indeed, after several conversations with members of both Project 2025 and the AFPI Transition Project, it’s clear that neither has any plans to back down—although naturally, befitting the D.C. think tank scene, their sniping was genteel. (“We always wanted to avoid duplication of effort. We can realize synergy by working together,” Paul Dans, who leads Project 2025, told me. “We’re not entirely dismissive of other groups that are kind of doing their own transition efforts, [but] we had invited them into the coalition several times and they have declined.” Hoeschler, who leads the AFPI team, described it as a friendly rivalry. “I think us being in this space has put more pep in their step and vice versa,” he told me.)

Yes, yes, sure. Inside the conservative movement, their conflict hasn’t gone unnoticed. “There’s definitely a rivalry between the two, because they’re dueling efforts,” a well-placed conservative insider summed it up to me. “They don’t see one another as complementary, they see them as competition.”

One of Project 2025’s top priorities, for instance, is creating a resume database, full of recommended hires associated with the group’s various legacy conservative partners—not just Heritage, but also the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Claremont Institute, the Conservative Partnership Institute, The Heartland Institute, Hillsdale College, the Leadership Institute, and at least two-dozen other influential nonprofits and think tanks. The coalition is also offering up academies to train these candidates on the inner workings of the federal bureaucracy.

Perhaps most importantly, the group plans to have its work completed, its policy suggestions and personnel lists approved, well ahead of the 2024 presidential transition. “We wanted to deliver it two years ahead of time and bring it to the candidate, not the president-elect, and say, ‘this is where conservatives sit on an issue,’” Dans told me, adding that the president could sort out the “10 percent deviations” on his own.

There are several Trump alumni in Project 2025 with experience in staffing the government—Dans, for instance, was Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management—but its “secret weapon,” as the person familiar with Heritage’s efforts told me, is the presence of Johnny McEntee as senior advisor. McEntee started off as Trump’s body man and rose to become the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, where he reportedly directed the federal agencies to purge career staff who were insufficiently loyal to Trump. “He was one of Trump’s closest confidants and still is,” this person told me.

By contrast, the AFPI, which only launched in 2021, has roughly $14 million in the bank per their most recent tax filings—including a $1 million donation from Trump’s Save America PAC. Among certain ideologically-driven members of MAGAworld (the Steve Bannon types), it’s got a reputation as a waystation for establishment swamp creatures riding Trump’s coattails: 170 full-time and part-time policy team members, as well as 450-plus volunteers who were former senior administration officials or Trump allies, including the aforementioned Kellyanne, as well as Robert Lighthizer, Rick Perry, John Ratcliffe, and many more.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Marc Lotter, AFPI’s chief communications officer and the director of strategic communications for the Trump 2020 campaign, argued to me. “I think one of the tremendous benefits of this project is that you’re learning from former cabinet level officials and chiefs of staff, not just what needs to be done next,” he said. “It’s, here are the things that took us a year to learn, here’s where the embedded bureaucracy gummed up the works, here’s how they blocked action or slowed or delayed.”

And, of course, on some level, it all boils down to money. “As with anything in D.C., there’s a fundraising component,” the well-placed insider told me. “They have to be in competition partially because they’re both trying to impress their donors, and they want to be able to tell their donors, well, if Trump were to win, we’d be ready to hit the ground with a whole host of staff and policy, and ours is the best—whether it’s Heritage or AFPI.”

Both groups are also in agreement that the original sin of the Trump administration was its botched White House transition process. Part of the problem was the sheer chaos of it all—first it was Chris Christie in charge of the transition, then it was Jared Kushner. And of course the dysfunction hardly improved once Trump was sworn in, as competing cliques and agendas clashed inside the Oval Office (Reince Priebus vs Bannon vs Jivanka and the New Yorkers…). Constant staff turnover in the West Wing didn’t stop the knife-fighting either, and the Trump agenda was always at war with itself. All of which, arguably, could be laid at the feet of the president himself.

Indeed, the abiding irony of the arms race between Project 2025 and AFPI is that for the millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours they are pouring into their individual initiatives, their efforts could all be rendered moot by the decision and whims of one man: the winner of the 2024 presidential election. Should that victor be the notoriously mercurial Trump, it’s hard to tell which organization would have the upper hand. There is plenty of character evidence to suggest he would ignore both of them. “I suspect he’s going to play footsie with both, and take names from both, and take policies from both and just kind of pick and choose,” the insider continued. “And he’s probably going to tell both of them you’re my guy. Because in the end, it’s all for him.”

For now, both teams coexist under the aegis of Reagan’s 11th Commandment: Thou shall not speak ill of another conservative. (Dans specifically invoked it when I asked him about their entreaties to AFPI.) And both have acknowledged that it’s up to the president to decide which team to use, fully aware that it’s possible that he could use people from both. Either way, things could get ugly. “We got the 2016 transition wrong,” said the person familiar with Project 2025. “We let the establishment hijack it. This time we’re starting early and the true conservatives are gonna get it right and control it.”