Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, Tina here subbing in for Julia, who will be back tomorrow.

In this edition, we’ve got quite a list of conversations to cover inside Washington: a looming government shutdown, a senator indicted for googling “what is the price of gold” for the wrong reasons, and a Speaker who’s probably wondering what sort of awful deal he’s struck with the devil. Our main story tonight, of course, is the DeSantis predicament ahead of Wednesday’s G.O.P. debate, plus Trump’s early general election pseudo-pivot.

But first… a congressional update from Abby Livingston, who will be in conversation with Penta’s Kevin Madden this Thursday, 9/28 at 1 p.m. ET during Puck’s first Quarter Call, a new subscriber perk featuring conversations with industry analysts and insiders. You can sign up here.

• Menendez Fallout: Senate Democrats up for reelection next year were falling over themselves today to call for the resignation of their colleague Bob Menendez, post-indictment. But one member’s call, in particular, drew outsize attention: Mendendez’s mentee and New Jersey’s junior senator, Cory Booker. As of press time, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey, John Fetterman, Jacky Rosen, John Tester, and Peter Welch had also called for Menendez to step down. “You realize all these Senators are coming out now before they get ‘gaggled’ tonight…” one Democratic lobbyist quipped over text, referring to the swarm of reporters hanging around the Senate chamber. Naturally, there’s some political gamesmanship afoot. Now, if Menendez does stay on (as he seems determined to do), Democrats can say they held one of their own facing indictment to a standard that Republicans won’t with George Santos, or G.O.P. presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. For inquiring minds, the last time the Senate expelled a member was 1862, for siding with Confederacy. Since the Civil War, the Senate has instead leaned on censure as a punishment to pressure senators into resignation.

  Again, keep an eye on the county chairs in New Jersey, where Menendez is bleeding support. But even their power is limited to denying Menendez local endorsements that give preferential treatment on the ballot (known as “the line”) in the state’s June primary. If Menendez sticks this out, he risks pariah status until he faces reelection, but that’s about it for now.

• Penn Avenue Freeze Out: Shutdown negotiations are entering the calm-before-the-storm phase. Members are not returning for votes until Wednesday, the final push before the Saturday midnight deadline to fund the government. Indeed, things are looking so grim that even the most die-hard Bruce Springsteen fans on Capitol Hill are expressing relief that The Boss delayed his Friday night concert at Nats Park, which reporters and leadership staffers feared they would otherwise have to miss… and potentially eat the cost of those E-Street tickets.

• Top of the Lake: Republican Kari Lake all-but-announced her entrance into the Arizona Senate race on Tuesday, which delighted Democrats after she underperformed expectations during her gubernatorial run last year. “A Lake announcement is what national Republicans have long anticipated and have somewhat made peace with,” Cook Political Report Senate analyst Jessica Taylor told me. “Despite their efforts to influence primaries elsewhere, they believed from the outset that if she ran, she’d win the primary no matter what they did.”

  Given the brewing three-way race between incumbent Kyrsten Sinema (who has yet to announce her candidacy after becoming an independent) and Ruben Gallego (on track to be the Democratic nominee), Taylor believes that Lake would have a stronger chance if she had some level of cross-party appeal. Alas, “that’s not where the Arizona Republican Party is,” she noted. “And that’s why they’ve lost three successive Senate races.”

Nevertheless, when I talk to allies of Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and all the rest, they invariable encourage patience: there’s still months to go before Iowa, they insist, and all they really need is some time to get in front of more voters and make their case. On Wednesday night, of course, Trump’s rivals will get their next big opportunity: A second G.O.P. presidential primary debate without the frontrunner on stage.

Of course, there’s no reason for DeSantis to drop out yet—as of his June financial disclosures, he had $12.2 million in his campaign; his allied super PAC, Never Back Down, had $97 million. But party operatives and consultants—the professional class that’s paid to advise and occasionally turn around campaigns—believe that the Wednesday debate will be crucial for DeSantis to demonstrate his viability as the best Trump challenger before someone like Haley takes up that mantle. And it’s not just about proving himself on a policy level; it’s about validating that he can match Trump if they ever go head to head. “Trumpism is about being a showman,” noted a Trump ally. “It’s about having swag, it’s about walking into a room and a girl wanting you to sign her tits.” (Unfortunately, that really happened.)

“Swag” is certainly not a word that anyone would ever associate with DeSantis. So I floated this question to a longtime Tallahassee insider: In an election increasingly determined by pure vibes, would anyone ever suggest to DeSantis that his personality, or lack thereof, might be the problem? “I don’t think anyone would tell him that anytime soon because 1), it’s a surefire way to get your ass fired; and 2) they genuinely believe in their Iowa strategy,” he replied.

Not surprisingly, that unbridled optimism and lack of honest feedback may now be hurting the DeSantis campaign. As I’ve previously reported, the ride-or-die ethos within DeSantis World largely stems from the fact that a majority of his inner circle are loyalists from Tallahassee, a city where they had near-despotic rule. “It’s a small world down there,” the Florida insider noted. “But it’s the bunker mentality that comes from constantly being under attack. It just pushes you deeper into that world.”

The insularity of the DeSantis brain trust is unusual: his former campaign manager, Generra Peck, was his former gubernatorial campaign manager; new campaign manager James Uthmeier was his chief of staff in the governor’s office; social media bomb thrower Christina Pushaw was his spox as governor; Ryan Tyson was his pollster in the gubernatorial race; and so on. This might have created a safer, leak-proof campaign, but the Florida insider suggested that, alas, the DeSantis war room became a veritable echo chamber of self-affirmation.

“[They] think the race is closer than the polls show, think the [Iowa governor] will endorse Ron, think other candidates are going to run out of money and start dropping out,” he lamented. “Now I think if you get to November or early December and no one’s dropped out and the polling looks the same or worse, there will be allies who will try to convince him that he’s risking his future political career. But I don’t know who those people are. Chip Roy?”

Last weekend, for instance, during an interview on Meet the Press, Trump said that he was opposed to Republicans pushing a complete ban on abortion, and suggested that he would push for some kind of national bargain that appeased both pro-choice and pro-life activists. (“We’re going to agree to a number of weeks or months or however you want to define it.”)

Of course, their loyalty is likely connected to the fact that he nominated no less than three pro-life judges to the Supreme Court, which led to the dismantling of Roe v. Wade. Hew as they might, his fellow candidates will never be able to match that sweeping act. “This idea that Trump, the guy who supported Supreme Court Justices, who overturned Roe… all of a sudden, people are going to think that Trump is a New York liberal who doesn’t share your values?” the Trump ally pointed out. “That was the whole campaign in the 2016 primary, and how did that end?”

And while DeSantis’ allies have tried to argue that Trump might be less pro-life than a true conservative primary voter, particularly in Iowa, this too might be a moot point. “The problem of conservatism there is that voters are voting for a person, not a policy book. And the thing is, Trump already has the trust of voters, because he was the right president,” the Trump ally continued to argue. “That’s what makes this whole argument from DeSantis World that Trump’s not a true conservative insane—because he governed as a conservative.”

Anyway, the conservative heresies are expected to continue on Wednesday, when Trump is planning to hold a rally near an auto plant in Michigan with the hopes of appealing to rank-and-file members of the United Auto Workers, whose membership is currently in the second week of a nationwide strike. He’s even gone so far as to demand that the UAW, a longtime Democratic stronghold, officially endorse him. (Tim Scott, for comparison, said that every striking worker should be fired.)

Of course, it was precisely these heterodox instincts that helped Trump dominate the Republican field in 2016—a lesson that Haley, Scott, and others appeared to forget in the first Republican debate when they promised to slash government spending and gut entitlements. (Trump never cut Medicare or Social Security as president, and ran up the national debt by trillions.) Trump, after all, has never been particularly ideological—he was once a Democrat, don’t forget—giving him a more tactile instinct for the aesthetics of the Republican base. And no vibe resonates more powerfully with MAGA than the blue-collar American factory worker, even if they are in a union. “Trump has always had this view of American manufacturing as being this behemoth and longs for the days of factories churning out stuff like they did 100 years ago,” a Republican strategist unaffiliated with any presidential candidates told me.

Notably, Trump’s pet peeve with the auto manufacturers seems to coalesce around his luddite disdain for electric cars more than any high-minded policy disagreement over, say, minimum wages. While independents might view this as a politically-neutral issue (so neutral that Biden himself has joined the picket lines), base voters tend to be reactionary. “This same base hates any company engaged in a social policy that doesn’t align with their beliefs,” the Republican strategist observed, placing the electric vehicle issue in the broader context of the culture war. “Remember, the mindset is that all the things Dems like, particularly social stuff, are evil and a threat to them.”