Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara Palmeri.

Could the Trump-TikTok effect be the sleeper story of the election? As I predicted last month, Trump has joined the Gen Z video platform, which has become a surprising hotbed of MAGA activity. Since Saturday, he’s picked up 5.7 million followers, dwarfing the 363,000 followers that Biden has accrued during the past six months. The Biden team emphasizes that, unlike Trump’s personal account, Biden’s is a campaign account. Okay!

🎧 Programming note: Andrew Yang made some news on the latest episode of my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, when he talked about getting the call from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his running mate. Yang explained why he turned Kennedy down. Despite starting his own third party, he also discussed why he’s warning voters against going rogue this time. Listen here or here.

In tonight’s edition, I work through the political fallout from Trump’s conviction as Washington braces for his sentencing next month. For now, Republicans are more unified than ever, and Democrats are still trying to figure out how to leverage Trump’s new “convicted felon” status into votes. Will they look back on November 6 and realize they should have handled it differently?

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

Needless to say, these are not the profiles of Jackson and Perry. Jackson was the subject of a scathing 2021 Pentagon Inspector General report that led to a Navy demotion, and last year, he was briefly detained at a rodeo after an altercation with local law enforcement. Meanwhile, the F.B.I. seized Perry’s cell phone in 2022 while investigating the January 6 insurrection, and a federal judge ruled the phone data was fair game. What’s more, according to Punchbowl, the new committee assignments came at the behest of Donald Trump and after a concerted Freedom Caucus lobbying effort.

New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill tweeted the quiet part out loud on Wednesday: “I have serious concerns about Reps. Perry & Jackson serving on the Intel Committee, considering their efforts to overturn free & fair elections, incite an insurrection, and their reckless actions on the job. They’ll weaponize the Intel Committee to support Trump’s agenda.” Amid the blowback, a Johnson spokesman reiterated to The New York Times the speaker’s “utmost confidence in Congressmen Perry and Jackson to capably serve the American people on the Intelligence Committee.”

Of course, this is yet another reminder that we’ve entered an era of mutual suspicion between the two House caucuses. Historically, leaders in the House majority rarely, if ever, overruled the minority leader’s committee assignments. But three years ago, Pelosi vetoed Kevin McCarthy’s appointment of Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the House select committee investigating January 6. During the same term, House Democrats (along with a handful of Republicans) voted to boot Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments. House Republicans returned the favor in 2023, when they removed the Democratic leader on Intel, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell from the committee. It seems fairly obvious that at least some House Democratic members will raise questions about these assignments if they recapture the gavel next fall.

Since Trump’s May 30 conviction, however, the ritual tut-tutting has become a whisper. Even the most self-serious, chin-stroking moderates—those that remain in Washington, anyway—are defending Trump. Susan Collins, who typically makes at least some gesture of disapproval each time a new Trump scandal surfaces, came out right away against the verdict. Lisa Murkowski acknowledged Trump’s “baggage” but mostly used the opportunity to attack Biden’s record. Larry Hogan, who called on Americans to “reaffirm” the rule of law, was swiftly excommunicated by the R.N.C. “Even privately, everyone is uniformly appalled by the New York case,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong, who is running for governor of North Dakota and doesn’t hold back from speaking about rifts in his party.

Still, I’ve never seen the G.O.P. more united behind Trump. “I don’t know any Republicans who are saying, ‘This is the last straw: Fuck Trump,’” said Matthew Bartlett, a former Trump administration official who resigned from the State Department on January 6. “Quite the opposite. It might be bringing back some of the disaffected, maybe even some of the never-Trumpers. There have been plenty of times in the past 10 years, from the campaign to the government, when there have been decisive flashpoints for people to decide whether to be with Trump or not. This was not one of those moments.”

Ironically, it’s the Democrats who seem confused about how to handle Trump’s newly minted felon designation. At a fundraiser Monday night at the Greenwich home of Richard Plepler, Biden, who stayed for just half an hour, finally came out swinging, sort of, saying the phrase “convicted felon” as guests including Shonda Rhimes and hedge fund billionaire Steve Mandel applauded. But he was behind closed doors and surrounded by well-heeled supporters, not in front of cameras during primetime. Publicly, at least, the signal from the White House appears to be that Democrats should approach the verdict solemnly, rather than taking a victory lap or going on the attack.

Without any clear guidance from the Biden campaign, I’m told Democratic operatives are juggling text chains and phone calls about whether they should push harder on the felony conviction or stay focused on the issues. Should they tweet out “#convicted felon” in all caps? Send around memes of Trump in an orange jumpsuit behind bars? Or keep their powder dry and let the conviction speak for itself, so as not to play into Trump’s false claim that Joe Biden was the puppet master behind his prosecution, weaponizing the D.O.J. as a form of election interference? “I haven’t seen a consensus on how to handle the conviction,” said former Biden White House official Michael LaRosa. “If anything, if I were the Biden team, I would want to downplay it, because if you’re running against a convicted felon, the race shouldn’t be too close to call.”

Some Democrats, of course, aren’t being coy. “I’m leaning in. He’s a convicted felon! It’s ridiculous he’s running,” said Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle, a ranking member on the Budget committee. “However, I don’t think it’s enough to stop there. We have to make explicit why it impacts regular people, which it does in this way: Trump will be too busy with his various legal problems to work for the American people.”

And no one in either party claims to know how the upcoming July 11 sentencing will sway voters. If Judge Merchan delivers a prison sentence of a few days, if only to assert the court’s authority, as some legal observers say he must, there’s no telling what voters will think. Would the optics of Trump in a jumpsuit, ungroomed and incarcerated even for one night in the infamous squalor of Rikers Island, cause Republicans to rethink their frontrunner? Would independents have to factor in how a candidate facing incarceration would be able to do his job as president? If Merchan hands down years of jail time, which seems unlikely, would Trump’s appeal, and the resulting legal battle, boost his claim that he’s a martyr? “Simply putting the label ‘convicted felon’ on Donald Trump doesn’t change a lot,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson said on my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win. “I think the sentence he is given is the moment when things will change.” Alas, she added, it will probably be difficult for pollsters to gauge the sentencing’s immediate impact because of its proximity to the July 15 convention, an event which always gives each party a natural bump.

For now, at least until next month, Trump’s ability to bob and weave when he’s under attack may make the Biden campaign wary of overreach. “I think the smartest strategy [for Democrats] is to do everything possible to avoid giving credence to Trump’s claim that this is Biden coming after him,” said Anderson. “The more you lean into it, there is a real risk that you make it so that when Donald Trump says, Look, they’re just using this to attack me, that rings true for people.”

Last Thursday, on the night the verdict was announced, Anderson said she checked in with 500 voters she’d previously polled. She found that 97 percent who said they were voting for Trump were still voting for him, and 98 percent of Biden voters were also staying put. Forty percent of the undecideds, however, were now leaning toward Biden. While the polling sample was small, Anderson said that the results could be meaningful in an election that may come down to 5,000 people in Wisconsin. Good news for Biden—if the election were held today.