Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara Palmeri, still here at the D.N.C., which has the look and feel of a highly produced awards show, with top-shelf musical talent. (Beyoncé, anyone?) The programming couldn’t be more different than Trump’s convention, a WWE-meets-CPAC Milwaukee bro-fest.

Speaking of Trump… This week, the Republican nominee homed in on North Carolina, suggesting that the state, which Republicans have taken for granted since 2008, might be in play. Meanwhile, everyone inside the campaign is trying to keep up with the candidate and decipher what the return of Corey Lewandowski means. More on the “chilling” effect it’s causing, below.

🎧 Kamala’s Achilles’ Heel: On the latest episode of my election podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, I chatted with NBC’s Chuck Todd about the state of the Harris campaign and the legacy of notable Democrats in the convention’s history. We also compared Harris’s current position in the race to the Obama and Clinton campaigns, discussed Tim Walz’s relationship with the media, and much more. [Listen Here]

But first, here’s Abby Livingston on the latest D.N.C. chatter…

Of course, Democrats had this same hope in 2018 when Beto O’Rourke tried (and narrowly lost) to unseat Cruz, and again in 2022 when he tried (and not-so-narrowly lost again) to take out Governor Greg Abbott. But at the Texas delegation breakfast in Chicago on Wednesday morning, I detected genuine conviction that Colin Allred will be the candidate to do what O’Rourke could not: “Send him back to Cancún,” in the words of Texas Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a close Allred ally.

It’s a notion being treated with some seriousness in national circles—if mostly out of necessity. As the nonpartisan Cook Political Report’s Jessica Taylor noted at a panel yesterday, Texas, of all places, may represent Democrats’ best chance (possibly even ahead of Florida!) to hold their Senate majority if Jon Tester falters in Montana (or any Dem incumbent elsewhere, for that matter). Taylor still rates Texas as “Likely Republican,” but polls appear to be tightening, with Allred far outraising and outspending Cruz. The other open question is whether the national parties end up throwing their own money at this race, especially given the expense of blanketing the state’s more than 20 media markets.

Meanwhile, Democrats are preparing to hand over a key speaking slot to Allred at their convention on Thursday, a pretty strong indication they are serious about Texas. So far, Allred has run a cautious and press-shy campaign. The big Texas urban regions have been moving toward the Democratic Party since 2016, and Trump does not play well in the cities and suburbs. One of the key factors to watch for is how energized the rural vote will be behind Trump, and, potentially, Cruz. —Abby Livingston

Now, of course, the split screen has flipped, with a triumphant Barack Obama joking about Trump’s, ahem, crowd size, while Trump is questioning rallygoers in North Carolina about whether he should fire his advisors for telling him to focus on policy over personal attacks. Naturally, that sardonic line has been sending jitters through his camp. “How many times has Trump said something as a joke, but eventually the joke turns into reality, or ended up having much more truth to it than folks originally believed?” one campaign source pointed out.

Indeed, it’s hard not to connect Trump’s “joke” to his recent appointment of Corey Lewandowski as his “personal envoy” with a mandate to shake things up. Lewandowski, who managed and then was fired from Trump’s 2016 campaign, is the ultimate yes-man (recall: He literally wrote a book called Let Trump Be Trump), which makes him the perfect emotional support animal as Trump tries to snatch momentum back from a surging Kamala Harris on his own terms. But while Lewandowski may be a balm for Trump’s ego, his presence is unsettling the wider mood inside Mar-a-Lago.

I’m told that merely having Lewandowski on calls with co-campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles has shifted these internal dynamics, especially when he questions the campaign’s existing ideas and tactics. “Look, just having someone question the campaign managers, it has a chilling effect,” said another campaign source. “Like someone is watching.”

He’s also started meeting with campaign staffers, just to see what they actually do day-to-day. Sure, it’s not the dreaded “forensic audit” that some aides were bracing for, but the persistent fear is that Lewandowski, who has a hard time working well with others, is leveraging his alone time with Trump to ingratiate himself with the principal, perhaps with designs on taking over the campaign in the coming weeks. “Everyone is very guarded with Corey around,” one Mar-a-Lago insider told me. “The campaign is trying to put him in a box to define his role, but Corey is saying his role is whatever he and Trump want it to be.”

Lewandowski’s defenders argue that Trump needs an attack dog to go toe-to-toe with the Democrats, and with Steve Bannon locked up in federal prison, Corey is the next best thing. He might also help to expand the bandwidth of the campaign, which has struggled to keep up with all of the incoming requests from surrogates and electeds who say their calls aren’t being answered. The trouble, of course, is that Lewandowski doesn’t seem like he’ll be satisfied with a functional role, or as a functionary. Instead, I’m hearing that Lewandowski is looking to bring on more loyalists, such as 2016 campaign manager David Bossie, to expand his own power base within the campaign. Whether or not he’s maneuvering with Trump’s imprimatur, raising the pressure on LaCivita to withdraw or for Wiles to operate at a higher level, Trump himself has certainly hinted that there’s more change to come.

“None of these palace intrigue stories have been remotely correct,” said Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung. “The fact remains—President Trump has put together the best political team in campaign history from the very start when he announced, and we are all committed to victory so he can return to the White House and save this country.”

Alas, as Trump weathers the indignity of a week of sustained criticism from heavy hitters like the Obamas and the Clintons at the D.N.C., I’m hearing that the advisors and senior campaign officials urging Trump to play nice are losing that argument. Instead, the emerging conventional wisdom is that Trump has earned the right to personal attacks that satisfy his need to hit back, as long as they are actually effective and don’t turn off independents and swing voters. “He feels like it’s a double standard,” one advisor told me. “He’s not supposed to respond? Anyone would.” Another advisor disagreed with the need to accommodate Trump’s desire to counterpunch: “I don’t care about being fair, I just want to win.”

Next week, the campaign plans to try a new line of attack, focusing on the fact that Harris hasn’t held a press conference, suggesting that she’s hiding from reporters because she’s not quick on her feet. “They’ll just keep mocking her and attacking her and trying to get reporters to ramp up the pressure,” said a campaign source. “They’ll really hammer that coming out of [the convention]. They think when she’s not on her script, that’s when she gets exposed.” Kellyanne Conway, who hasn’t officially joined the campaign but is someone, like Lewandowski, Trump has been turning to for advice, told me, “Trump can prevail against Kamala on both policy and personality. Polls show he is preferred on the economy, border, crime, and national security.”

And yet, perhaps the biggest coup for Trump will be getting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s support tomorrow, when he’s expected to announce the suspension of his campaign and endorse Trump, helping him solidify his grip on the Joe Rogan-verse of anti-vaxxers and other low-propensity voters. I’m told that they’re currently working on the details of Kennedy’s future role with the campaign, namely which regions they would deploy him to and with what type of messaging. Karl Rove suggested on Fox News today that Kennedy could be useful in Arizona and Georgia, where he may have only 10,000 or so followers, but could push Trump over the edge in a coin flip election. It’s unclear whether Kennedy’s running mate Nicole Shanahan, who said on a podcast this week that R.F.K. would make a terrific secretary of Health and Human Services in a Trump administration, will campaign for Trump, herself.