Good evening,

Welcome back to The Washington Mall, which by now you well know is my insider’s account of what’s really going on in this town. Thanks for supporting Puck.

Tonight I’m focused on the surprisingly tense relationship between Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who despite the many nicknames tying them together, are not in fact D.C.’s Bennifer. It’s a story about how politics makes for strange, ephemeral bedfellows—and antagonists.

But first, here are a few things I’m hearing around town…

• Anita Dunn, the former lobbyist-turned-White House aide (redux redux), gets supremely sensitive about the impression that there’s a revolving door between her namesake firm, SKDK, and the Biden administration. Nevertheless, as Dunn leads a reorganization of the White House comms department from Cedric Richmond’s old office in the West Wing, she is interviewing SKDK staffers, among others, for vacancies. These people would ostensibly work under comms director Kate Bedingfield, but their loyalty is to Dunn. I saw one email in which Dunn discussed a job with a former colleague. (A spokesperson for the White House said “It’s simply not true.”)

• Senate Democrats, some of whom have decried their G.O.P. colleagues’ lenient attitude toward masking, have adopted an unofficial “Don’t Test, Don’t Tell,” protocol of late, particularly as they endeavor to pass the historic Inflation Reduction Act this weekend. One senior Senate aide told me, “They’re not going to delay it if a member has gotten Covid. Counterparts are saying they’re not going to test anymore. It’s not an official mandate but we all know we’re not letting Covid get in the way. The deal is happening. Less testing, just wear masks and get it done.” When Chuck Schumer was asked about a plan B today in case someone drops out with Covid he said: “We’re not talking about a plan B. We’re going to stay healthy.” Another source said that if you catch Covid “you can bring your ventilator and still vote…”

• Trafalgar has long been Trump’s pollster of choice, an observation that was reaffirmed on Monday after the firm’s founder, Robert Cahaly, sealed Trump’s ridiculous double endorsement of “Eric”—leaving open to interpretation whether he meant Eric Schmitt or Eric Greitens. Trump had been leaning toward Eric Greitens, who is advised by his future daughter-in-law Kim Guilfoyle. But then Cahaly called Trump to say that his polling showed Schmitt had a clear lead, with or without an endorsement. Trump had been toying with a double endorsement for months, as I wrote back in January, when he was suspicious of his aides and the candidates that they were lobbying for. Like a six-year-old, he also saw it as an error-proof (if totally absurd) way to pad his scorecard. Meanwhile, Schmitt’s team has been told to hold off on taking the relationship to the next level, like a fundraiser at Mar-a-lago. Guilfoyle, who Trump aides call a “force of nature,” is still stewing over her loss.

• Speaking of Trump, I’m hearing that he’s telling people that he wants to announce his candidacy in September. Of course, this is a moving target. (More on that in my column below.)

• The Kansas abortion vote has spooked Republicans. One top operative told me that it’s become a “collective freakout” within the party as they struggle to move off the defensive on the issue. One problem is that most Republican consultants are pro-choice and they have advised their candidates to steer clear of abortion, which has subsequently allowed Democrats to define the issue. “The fear is that women think the lead agenda item for Republicans is abortion and it’s going to paralyze everybody,” said one top G.O.P consultant. “Everybody is telling everybody not to talk about abortion.” On the flip side, there’s talk of labeling Democrats as extremists who want late term abortions funded by taxpayers, abandoning Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare.”

• Hill insiders keep referring to Nancy Pelosi’s diplomatic mission to Taiwan as a legacy defining moment, setting her up as a statesman ahead of her anticipated retirement, likely sometime next year after Democrats lose the House. (My partner Julia Ioffe has more here on Pelosi’s hawkish history with China.) It also positions her for a potential ambassadorship. As I reported months ago, the White House is leaving Italy open for her.

Not surprisingly, this was, of course, a massive oversimplification and an incorrect lumping together of two very different, and largely misunderstood characters. Personality-wise, the two are practically antithetical. While they both crave being the center of attention, they have vastly different approaches. Sinema takes herself seriously and is constantly endeavoring to be substantive, showing up to meetings prepared with spreadsheets, data points, and typically thoughtful questions. She ducks the Capitol Hill press in a manner that makes it appear that she is terrified of them, whereas Manchin will often hold court with his favorite reporters.

Indeed, Manchin often appears uncomfortable when he’s not leading the conversation with his straight-from-the-gut takes and old-school political instincts. He fidgets and shakes his leg while he waits his turn to talk, before overpowering the conversation with wild gestures. “When the attention turns off him and goes on to someone else, he gets agitated,” one observer told me. “There’s definitely competitive tension between them.” But Manchin also knows how to turn on his college jock charm. When he’s not serving pizza and cocktails on his double-wide houseboat, he’s often spotted at soirees hosted by the French ambassador with his good friend, Steve Clemons, the Semafor editor-at-large.

So, long story short, it’s lazy and unfair to tie them together simply because they have thwarted Biden’s agenda. “Why everyone thinks the two have anything in common, I’ve never understood,” said a former Senate aide. As another aide put it: “He hates being lumped in with her.”

In fact, this is actually pretty well known on Capitol Hill, at least in a hush-hush way. “He doesn’t have anything in common with her,” said another former Senate staffer. “To put Sinema and Manchin together is poor journalism, and just silly to assume they’re friends.” (A Manchin spokesperson, Samantha Runyon, rejected these characterizations when I reached out for comment. “Senator Manchin has a great deal of respect for his good friend Senator Sinema and reports to the contrary are a silly distraction from the importance of the Inflation Reduction Act,” Runyon said. “Unnamed attacks on their relationship are a desperate attempt from the far left and far right to take aim at the moderate middle that most Americans identify with.”)

Now, this story has come full circle. After parading around the Sunday show circuit to promote the Inflation Recovery Act, Manchin has to get his legislation through a gridlocked 50-50 Senate. Which means he needs the blessing of Sinema, whom Punchbowl reported this morning was “blindsided” by what Manchin and Chuck Schumer cooked up. “The two people who the deal is tied to, don’t actually like each other,” said a senior Hill source. That may explain why you saw him literally kneeling on the Senate floor yesterday, while she was presiding, to explain his bill, and then again today when he cozied up to her on the floor to talk again.

Sinema has not bothered to charm her Democratic colleagues, making her one of the least popular colleagues in the caucus. At the same time, she has endeared herself to Senate Minority Whip John Thune, which will help her if Republicans take back power in the Senate. But she still lacks the kind of relationship that Manchin has built with Mitch McConnell. And in a lot of ways, she has endured sexism that Manchin will never understand, including from colleagues on her own side.

The two are also vastly different in their ambitions. Manchin, as I recently wrote, doesn’t love the upper chamber, where he is one of 100, and has told many people that he misses being governor of West Virginia. Sinema, on the other hand, is entering the prime of her career in a critical swing state. There have been rumblings of a quixotic third-party bid in 2024, which obviously seems unlikely but is the sort of quintessential D.C. smoke bomb that foreshadows larger ambitions down the road.

What the two share, of course, is that they are “kind of in the same lane,” the Senate aide noted. “They compete for who is the most moderate and bipartisan member of the caucus.” But in terms of actual policy, they have starkly different priorities. Manchin is much further to the left on taxes than Sinema, who has said that she does not want the IRA bill to include a tax increase. She’s further to the left of Manchin on climate, and so he claims that he stretched himself on this topic to address what he assumed would be her concerns based on their BBB conversations. He’s also a deficit hawk, whereas she appears to be speaking for the finance community when she advocated against including the carried interest loophole revision. For Manchin, a former coal executive, it’s about what’s in it for West Virginia. Whereas Sinema is thinking about Arizona—a larger economy that aims to be more startup-friendly and compete with Texas.

Sinema has channeled some of her concerns about the bill but hasn’t made up her mind on how she will vote, which is driving everyone crazy and will likely force them to stay at the Capitol over the weekend. It’s also giving people nightmarish flashbacks to her historic Gladiator-style downward-thumb “no” vote on raising the minimum wage.

At the end of the day, most people presume that Sinema will pass this bill. Naturally, her calculation may be that pissing off Manchin will be a bigger issue for her in the next Congress, if it’s handed back to Republicans, than it will be to tank a bill pushed by Schumer, as she’s done in the past.

Lately, however, another name has emerged as a possible outside candidate to run Trump’s campaign—Kellyanne Conway. The former White House aide, whose marriage and domestic life became crossover TMZ fodder, was in the Trumpworld doghouse a few months ago on account of a passage in her memoir, Here’s the Deal, in which she acknowledged that Trump did not win the 2020 election. Conway also faced some heat when her preferred candidate for the Nebraska gubernatorial race, Charles Herbster, lost his primary even after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Not good for his scorecard.

Nevertheless, multiple sources in Trump’s inner circle tell me that Conway is back in his good graces and, as she made clear in her book, she was not happy to be sidelined from the 2020 race by former campaign manager Brad Parscale. It was noted that she received multiple shoutouts during Trump’s AFPI speech last week. And while there’s been no formal conversation between Conway and Trump, they’ve been waxing nostalgic about 2016 as of late. “He speaks of yips and superstition and wants a 2016 reunion of sorts,” said one person with knowledge of his thinking.

As for Wiles, she’s bound to get a senior role in the increasingly inevitable Trump campaign, but it’s unclear if she would fight Conway for the managerial title, if it came to that, or if there might be more of a flat organizational chart in which the two work together. But if Trump’s org ends up being hierarchical, which all organizations inevitably become, as one Trump loyalist elegantly put it to me, indulging the literary powers of metaphor, the operating logic was that if you put Wiles and Conway in a cage match, it would be Conway—widely credited with winning Trump’s first campaign—who would likely emerge as the victor. This is an indubitably sexist and moronic analogy, but it’s also a startlingly accurate depiction of the inner workings of Trump’s WWE-style political circus.

Only time will tell, but as I’ve reported, that information will likely come out in the fall as Trump aides caution him against launching his campaign ahead of the midterms. He has told people he’s looking at announcing in September. Whoever ends up without the title may still be incentivized to hang around the hoop. It’s also worth recalling that, in Trumpworld, the first campaign manager is never the last.