Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest.

Congratulations to Speaker Mike Johnson for identifying the one thing that every House Republican can agree on. (True, that thing was “voting to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden,” but it counts.) Tonight, Abby Livingston brings you the latest from Congress, while I report live from the right-wing activist disaster known as the unauthorized Trump administration transition projects.

(Also, channeling Bernie Sanders, I am once again asking you to click this preorder link for The MAGA Diaries, which Publishers Weekly called “a spirited take on the political operative class” and “entertaining and insightful.” I’ll take it!)

Despite the fact that House Republicans have yet to reveal any “bombshells” that hold up to even basic scrutiny, it’s nonetheless a big deal to vote on anything involving the word “impeachment” and a sitting president. Here’s the latest swirling around the Capitol:

• Backlash Fears: Among Republicans, the conventional wisdom previously held that the impeachment inquiry greenlit by Kevin McCarthy back in September risked becoming a runaway train, and would lead to a Senate trial that many of his colleagues didn’t actually want. But recent public statements from vulnerable Republicans like David Valadao indicate that, despite Mike Johnson’s confidence that he has the votes, these vulnerable members are not prepared to vote for full impeachment charges against Biden. House Republican operatives in touch with members tell me that this sentiment is only more pronounced in private conversations.
• Loose Lips: Troy Nehls, a sophomore Texas Republican rabble-rouser, seemed to validate Democratic counterarguments that this a politically motivated inquiry. Asked by a Rolling Stone reporter outside the Capitol what he hoped to gain, Nehls responded “All I can say is Donald J. Trump 2024, baby!” This is that kind of quiet-part-out-loud comment that McCarthy made in 2015, which crippled his first speaker’s bid along with the Republican Benghazi investigation.

  But Nehls, of course, is a rank-and-file member, and without the influence of someone in leadership. And members of the House G.O.P. conference writ large no longer seem interested in putting on pretenses of operating in good faith. Perhaps the real takeaway from this exchange is that at least one House Republican seems to believe that impeachment is a political winner next year. This runs completely against the current conventional wisdom, which is that impeachment generally does not play well for the prosecuting side.

• “A Loss of Priorities”: Democratic members, for their part, are utterly disgusted with the impeachment inquiry. But the operatives who work for them are utterly delighted, and will hasten to identify every single one of the 17 House Republicans from a district Biden carried in 2020 who voted for the inquiry. It could be argued that even if an impeachment gets to a spring-ish Senate trial stage, it will likely be forgotten as a live issue.

  Even so, Republicans seem content to use impeachment as a means to level the presidential contest by having two presidential candidates with the impeachment black mark. But shifting away from its potential impact on the presidential campaign, one nervous Republican operative expressed concern that amid all of the other pending tumult—Ukraine, Israel, the border, the Farm Bill, fending off a government shutdown, etcetera—pushing onward with impeachment without convincing evidence could demonstrate “a loss of priorities” for House Republican incumbents. —Abby Livingston

This sort of message discipline seemed unprecedented for Trump world, but it was also fairly necessary. As I reported back in October, a number of conservative groups have been eagerly laying the groundwork for Trump’s return: publishing policy papers, pre-vetting potential staff, developing ideological training programs, and drawing up shortlists for top agency appointments. (These lists, of course, inevitably seem to include the list-makers, themselves.) Leading the charge has been The Heritage Foundation and its allies, who are developing a “turnkey” operation for whichever Republican wins the primary, and the America First Policy Institute, essentially a well-funded sinecure for various Trump alumni. (“It’s basically the Trump administration in exile,” a conservative insider told me.)

And there is a lot of cash tied up in the Heritage and AFPI campaigns. Heritage, I’m told, has pulled in meaningful cash from donors this year due to their interest in Project 2025. AFPI, staffed and advised by Trump alums including Kellyanne Conway, Linda McMahon, Pam Bondi, and Chad Wolf, reportedly raised $23 million in 2022, most of it coming from nonprofits linked to wealthy businessmen hoping to support their rival America First Transition Project. That’s more than a few million reasons for Trump and his aides to be pissed.

I reached out to both Heritage and AFPI to see if they wanted to comment on the Wiles-LaCivita statement, and have yet to hear back from either organization. That, in and of itself, may be a sign that they’ve gotten the message. After all, it’s not that the Trump team doesn’t recognize the utility of having a bunch of executive actions prewritten, or a ready-on-Day-One army of loyalists to install across federal agencies. Even Trump’s closest allies have acknowledged that perhaps the central failure of his administration was his inability to overcome the resistance of bureaucrats who second-guessed his policies, threw up legal roadblocks, or slow-rolled his agenda.

But as more stories have begun to circulate in the media about Trump’s emerging Day One plans—mass deportations, purging federal agencies, closing the border, turning the Justice Department on political opponents—the campaign has moved to shut the chatter down. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Wiles had reached out to the Heritage program director, Paul Dans, to warn him that talking to the press wasn’t helpful. Indeed, when I reached out to Heritage and AFPI in October to ask for details about their plans, they were more than happy to spill. Now, it’s mostly radio silence.

The Heritage Foundation, however, is a much older, more establishment, small-c conservative institution, despite its recent rebranding as a more MAGA-friendly think tank. The biggest nod to this was their hiring of Kevin Roberts, the former chair of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, as its new president, whereupon he immediately began trending Heritage in a nationalist conservative (or “natcon”) direction. But in right-wingerdom, the delta between being traditionalist conservative with a MAGA tinge, versus being purebred Trumpist, is vast. “Heritage is a true think tank in the sense that they put out policy papers. And they have scholars there that have been there for literally decades and think about policy, and regardless of who’s in control in Congress or in the White House, they’re gonna keep churning out their policy,” the conservative insider added. But on the flip side, their reputation as a deep-pocketed Washington institution that influences Republican decision-making processes makes them, in MAGA parlance, more inherently “swampy.”

Trump allies have also noted the praise Roberts has heaped on Ron DeSantis for years—inviting the Florida governor to give speeches at Heritage events, bestowing awards on him, and frequently visiting Tallahassee to offer policy advice. Indeed, Project 2025 itself was announced at an event headlined by DeSantis. In the early days of his campaign, when DeSantis looked like a more viable Trump challenger, Roberts defended his education policy decisions on Twitter, adding: “God bless @GovernorDeSantis.” (“I don’t think he is in contact with Trump,” a MAGA strategist noted dryly.)

But perhaps the most notable differentiator between the two groups, and their approach to selling themselves to Trump, is in the packaging of the work itself. Heritage, which has organized input from over 80 groups including the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a historically academic, frequently verbose institution. Political buffs will recall the 3,000-page “Mandate for Leadership” that Heritage gave Ronald Reagan in 1981, a tradition that still goes on to this day. (“Mandate for Leadership IX,” published in 2023 and the backbone of Project 2025, clocks in at over 900 pages.)

AFPI’s policy presentations, meanwhile, can be best described as snackable—befitting a president who famously demanded a single-page daily briefing packet that only covered three topics, and openly disdained long documents. (“I like bullets or I like as little as possible,” he told Axios in 2017. “I don’t need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.”) For all their lack of Reagan conservative pedigree, the AFPI staff—which includes half of Trump’s cabinet and, informally, Ivanka Trump, all of whom know Trump’s mind better than most—appear to have understood the assignment.