Hello and welcome to The Best and The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

A quick note: For those of you who also subscribe to my colleague John Ourand’s newsletter, The Varsity, you may have been surprised to hear I made a cameo at WrestleMania 40 this weekend. For the record: Yes, I was there on both nights, and yes, it should surprise absolutely no one that Puck’s resident populism whisperer is also a huge WWE fan. Let’s not make this political: Is it a thoughtcrime to enjoy watching The Undertaker chokeslam former quasi-presidential aspirant The Rock and help Cody Rhodes finish his story? Not in my America.

In tonight’s edition, the evolution of the Ronna McDaniel saga, after her R.N.C. ouster and the NBC rejection, as her search for a fourth act becomes a cautionary tale. In the Trump era, one cannot, to abuse a new favorite pun, Ronna-way from their past.

But first… here’s Abby Livingston with the readout from the Hill…

So much of the present madness is inextricably linked to the defenestration of Kevin McCarthy, who sat down for an interview at Georgetown University this week with retired Democratic brawler Mo Elleithee to dissect that memorable chapter of his life. Herewith, some of the more striking moments…

• Gaetz murmurs: Perhaps the most eye-popping stretch of the event, which went semi-viral on political Twitter, was the candor with which McCarthy openly discussed the ethics probe of Matt Gaetz—who, as you know, spearheaded his ouster. It’s hard to describe just how reticent congressional leaders and House Ethics Committee members typically are to discuss ethics investigations into colleagues. (Believe me, I’ve tried to get them to dish…) As it turns out, giving up the gavel might have been a form of liberation for McCarthy.
• “A very bad thing”: Reflecting on his ouster, McCarthy seemed certain that his former colleagues from both parties now regret throwing him out, and of the eight Republicans who led the effort, he said: “I think today, if you went back to the people, if they think that was a smart vote, I don’t think so.” He then added that “...historically, it’ll be viewed as a very bad thing to happen to our congress.”

  Naturally, McCarthy was asked whether Johnson serves under the same kind of motion-to-vacate threat. McCarthy replied: “The Dems will never let it happen [again].” And he may be right—I have yet to detect anywhere near the scale of enmity toward Johnson that regular House Democrats articulated about McCarthy in October.

• Pelosi poison: It was also striking how McCarthy framed Nancy Pelosi as one of the architects of his downfall. He recalled a story, just after the November 2022 election, wherein Pelosi encouraged him to make the concessions that put him in procedural jeopardy. He claims he recalled her saying “‘Oh, just give it to them. I told Boehner, I told Paul [Ryan]: We’ll never vote for that. We’ll table that every time.’ But when it came time, I guess she changed her mind.” Pelosi’s camp pushed back Tuesday night, with spokesman Aaron Bennett tweeting that: “It almost goes without saying at this point, but Kevin McCarthy should have 0 credibility in his retelling of events here on Capitol Hill.”

  Of course, Pelosi stepped down as the Democratic leader ten months before the McCarthy vote, and on the day itself she was in California for Dianne Feinstein’s funeral. My understanding at the time was that Hakeem Jeffries was already the undisputed leader of the caucus. And while Jeffries may have led the rank-and-file in this direction, there was already unanimous Democratic consensus to vote against McCarthy.

In retrospect, the McDaniel saga has become a cautionary tale for other Trump allies looking for soft landings as pundits, in boardrooms, or other phone-it-in sinecures. Ordinarily, someone of McDaniel’s stature would have been weighing an enviable slate of options: private sector jobs that leverage access in exchange for heaps of money, such as Jay Carney’s post-Obama positions at Amazon and Airbnb, or Reince Priebus’s borderline appalling $8 million-per-year golden cuffs at a Wisconsin law firm; or an equally high-powered position inside the conservative industrial complex, from managing a super PAC to joining a strategy firm. McDaniel, who was offered a modest $300,000 per year to be a talking head for the NBC News Group, presumably anticipated her green room journey to be a first step back toward mainstream respectability.

But she underestimated the hostility of her would-be colleagues, some of whom were in Washington on Jan. 6. McDaniel, in the wake of the 2020 election, had not only promoted doubts about the legitimacy of the vote, but was an active participant in efforts to overturn the result. She had also served as the party mouthpiece for the view that NBC—along with CNN and ABC, two other networks that sought to hire her—was “fake news.” More than a few people took those attacks personally.

Alas, Ronna McDaniel, who dropped her maiden name as part of her America First makeover, is now stuck in a political no-man’s-land: too closely associated with the excesses of Jan. 6 to be accepted back into polite society; too much of a squish to be embraced by MAGA; and, if we’re being honest, too untalented on television for any producer to consider overlooking her baggage. Perhaps most importantly, according to people familiar with her work at the R.N.C., McDaniel was always too isolated from Trump, either to sustain a career or to parlay her access into a cushier and better compensated job in the afterlife. “It’s not about money; the power is your relationships. And she didn’t have the relationships,” said Michael Steele, another former R.N.C. chairman. “She was always on the bubble with Trump. People don’t get that. The man told her to stop using her family name, and she fucking did. If she had the relationships, he never would have told her to do it.”

Even getting canceled by a mainstream media outlet wasn’t enough to patch up McDaniel’s reputation inside the party. In her case, the NBC News defenestration has generated more schadenfreude than sympathy. “She’s seen as someone who was willing to ditch the Romney name for Trump, and who failed every cycle, and who tried to hold on to the R.N.C. way too long,” one Republican insider told me. “There is no good will. No record of accomplishment. Nada.”

After her dramatic exit from NBC, the chatter was that McDaniel was eyeing a contributor contract with Newsmax, a network that bends to the right without the stature of Fox or the fanatical devotion of OAN. But even if network brass might have wanted her in their lineup, a warm reception now seems less likely. “Right-wing media chased her out of the R.N.C. in the first place!” said Kurt Bardella, a former G.O.P. flack and ex-Breitbart spokesman who broke from the party in 2016… and is a contributor on NewsNation. “So that takes her out of play for a Newsmax or OAN or Fox job.”

In fact, the very notion that McDaniel was the source of the R.N.C.’s problems originated in conservative media. True, the Trump campaign got annoyed when she signed off on primary debates, stoking right-wing rage. And there’s some truth to the notion that three cycles of down-ballot Republican losses occurred under her watch—although Trump himself is probably equally to blame. But the idea that McDaniel herself needed to be excised was a message that MAGA-aligned media kept hammering, even after she faced down a challenge for the chairmanship last June from Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who had previously represented Tucker Carlson, Andy Ngo, Project Veritas, and even Trump himself. Dhillon lost, but conservative media had no trouble picking sides.

Also priming the McDaniel ejector pump was Turning Point Action, an upstart branch of the student group Turning Point USA, which encouraged personalities like Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, and others to push the idea that McDaniel had been sabotaging Trump’s populist agenda via R.N.C. chicanery. In her final weeks, they scheduled a conference in Vegas called “Restoring National Confidence” (get it) as counterprogramming to the R.N.C.’s Winter Meeting down the street, and invited every R.N.C. member to attend. “Harmeet lost by a lot, but Turning Point kept up the drumbeat,” noted a former senior party official. Indeed, a third of R.N.C. members attended the Turning Point event, indicating significant internal resistance to McDaniel. (I was there and spoke to members who felt Turning Point served their interests better than the R.N.C.)

But even if the base didn’t much like her—“I don’t think it’s a crazy phenomenon for the base of either party to not be a fan of the party committee,” the former official noted dryly—McDaniel’s decision to even entertain the thought of appearing on MSNBC, the uncontested home base of the Never Trump movement, was pure poison. “She literally ran straight into the arms of the organization that the base hates the most,” said the MAGA-aligned comms official. “Literally, we hate MSNBC more than CNN. And that’s where you were going to go?”

There exists a space where McDaniel could transition, though it takes time: lie low and sign a deal for a dishy, tell-all memoir, reporting on the inner workings of the G.O.P. by way of her time as R.N.C. chair, to properly reframe her narrative. “Ronna is unique in a lot of ways because most J6 supporters are still in the Trump fold and therefore do have proximity to the inner workings and presumably can offer insight,” Bardella told me. But books take time to write, and McDaniel’s too-quick pivot toward center-right respectability didn’t really convince anyone. “It was so disingenuous that no one believed her about-face,” he said.

There may be another factor keeping McDaniel from taking the confessional route. “You’ll never hear her disparage [Trump],” said a person familiar with her thinking. “Whereas you have a bunch of other people who go out and write books and do tell-alls and whatnot—that’s just not her. Never has been. And you won’t see that anytime in the near future.”

History, however, has not been kind to people who’ve tried to stay on Trump’s good side and maintain the favor of the centrist establishment. Steele brought up the example of Sean Spicer, the high-profile G.O.P. spox with Washington credentials who dabbled in Trumpism as White House press secretary, and then tried to re-enter the mainstream—doing the media circuit, Dancing With the Stars, spoofing his job at the Emmys, trying for cable news contracts—while still praising and defending Trump. But all doors to the inner circles of Trumpworld slammed shut behind him.

The downward slide can be steep: After his controversial appearance on Dancing With the Stars, and a correspondent gig for Extra, and a three-year stint as a Newsmax host, Spicer now runs a small YouTube channel. “Fox didn’t pick him up. Why didn’t Fox pick him up?” Steele pointed out rhetorically. “I mean, normally, if you get the former press secretary of the president of the United States, who doesn’t want that person on [Fox]? Oh, Trump? Yeah, now a lot of people don’t.”

When the populist right removes a Republican from power, particularly anyone with ties to the D.C. establishment, they go scorched earth: MAGA-aligned conservative media runs segments on the person’s lack of allegiance to the base, their allied Washington officials use whatever procedures and bylaws they have on hand to nuke their livelihoods.

But the only way to truly kill an establishment person is if Trump joins in, waging months of psychological and messaging warfare to get said swamp creature to bend the knee or leave the arena. (Trump dissenter Mitch McConnell was badgered into retirement, while Kevin McCarthy, an establishment guy driven out of Congress by a MAGA faction, enjoys access to Trump and could potentially join his administration.) That Trump himself did not nuke McDaniel could be a sign that she could work her way back.

“Look at people like Kellyanne Conway or Steve Bannon or Reince Priebus, who have been fired, or Trump has been upset with, and they’re back,” the former party official said. “I think she survived longer than 95 percent of people in that orbit, and had what I thought was a relatively graceful exit.”