Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Daily Courant, your quotidian touch point with Puck.

Today, we draw your attention to Teddy Schleifer‘s fascinating reporting on Mark Zuckerberg’s new Republican political muscle, and Joe Biden‘s mounting problems in Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the effortlessly brilliant Julia Ioffe penetrates all the latest Manchin gossip. 

Enjoy the shortest day of the year, dear reader. We’ll be back with you tomorrow.

Silicon Valley’s Biden Beef and Zuckerberg’s Hired Gun

Notes on the latest tech industry gossip, fundraising, and political power plays.

Mark Zuckerberg’s political interests are, understandably, the subject of intense scrutiny. Liberals have long suspected that he is a hostage of the right, if not a Republican sympathizer, given the extensive aid that Facebook provided Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and Zuckerberg’s subsequent reluctance to boot him from the platform. Conservatives presume he is a hostage of his woke employees, if not a card-carrying progressive himself, given that he did eventually deplatform Trump.

That’s why I was intrigued to hear from a source that Zuckerberg recently hired Brian Baker, a longtime Republican strategist, for a new political project. Baker, as Washington insiders will know, is the well-respected political right hand to the billionaire Ricketts family—which includes Todd Ricketts, the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and until recently the G.O.P. finance chair, and Pete Ricketts, the Republican governor of Nebraska—as well as a key player in the high-dollar G.O.P. fundraising world more broadly. Baker has run outside groups and super PACs that devised vicious attacks on Barack Obama and was one of the few big-money players to support Trump in 2016. Zuckerberg and the Ricketts family are probably as far apart as any two donors could be.

Hiring Baker doesn’t make Zuckerberg a Republican. What it does make Zuckerberg, however, is smart. The Facebook founder is a fairly conventional Silicon Valley liberal—pro-success, pro-innovation, anti-partisanship—even if his primary political concern is Facebook itself. He takes advice from David Plouffe, the former Obama campaign manager who used to guide the political work of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and his personal political check-writing tends to fund broad, middle-of-the-road issues like criminal justice and immigration reform. Pretty anodyne stuff.

Of course, that’s not how Zuckerberg is perceived by many Republicans these days—which is why he needs Baker. Zuckerberg is now entering his second year of a controversy that just will not die: In the middle of the presidential election last summer, Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated a whopping $450 million to the nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life, in order to bolster election offices amid the coronavirus pandemic. Conservative media and politicians cried foul, accusing the CTCL and Zuckerberg of a thinly-veiled plot to boost voter turnout in predominantly Democratic counties. In fact, it appears the opposite happened: Zuckerberg and Chan also hired Michael Toner, a former F.E.C. commissioner and now a top G.O.P. campaign-finance lawyer, who put together a formal report showing that it was actually Republican-leaning jurisdictions that accounted for the majority of CTCL grants, even if Democratic counties, by dint of their larger populations, ultimately received the greater number of “Zuckerbucks.”

Zuckerberg’s team would certainly like to neutralize the “Zuckerbucks” narrative, which has resulted in Republican governors passing laws forbidding private philanthropies from funding election administration in the future. Hence the need to add Toner and Baker to balance out a communications team headed by former Obama press secretary Ben LaBolt, who, despite his White House experience, does not have as much credibility with the Murdoch outlets that have covered the CTCL storyline religiously.

It’s a savvy move. It also reveals how Zuckerberg increasingly is operating his personal fief using the same political strategies employed by Facebook, which has Democratic power brokers like Sheryl Sandberg working alongside Republican lobbyists like Joel Kaplan. As is true for any highly-polarizing mega-donor, you need everyone on retainer, metaphorical or otherwise, because you never know what crises will emerge.

Inside the Manchin Gossip Swirl

Washington is awash with rumors that Manchin and the Democrats—the swamp’s version of Bennifer—are on the verge of a break-up. Here’s what’s really happening.

Things are quieting down here in Washington. Congress is out of session and most everyone has gone home, either to celebrate the Christmas holiday with their loved ones or to take advantage of a week off. Which is why no one expected West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin to, as one senior Democratic Senate aide put it, “kick Joe Biden in the dick, especially after all the care and feeding he’s gotten.” And yet. On Sunday morning, Manchin went on FoxNews, the mouthpiece of the enemy party, and announced that, after all those months his fellow Democrats spent trying to placate his ever-evolving set of demands, he was pulling the plug on Build Back Better, half of Biden’s signature, legacy-defining legislation. One of Manchin’s staffers gave the President, who had personally coaxed and cajoled the stubborn Senator, 30 minutes’ warning, and then Manchin himself declined the President’s call before the cameras rolled. 

It sent Washington, which was now scattered all over the country, reeling. “I thought he would find a way to ‘yes,’ he likes to find agreements and get stuff done,” said a source close to Manchim. “But once I saw that he was going on Fox News, it wasn’t a surprise.” Democrats fumed—see above—and Republicans celebrated. “All around great day,” one senior Senate G.O.P. aide texted me on Sunday. 

But was it really that much of a surprise? Or, rather, should it have been? 

Manchin was never a “yes.” Since the summer, when Democrats began to plot how to pass both an infrastructure bill and a sweeping, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink package to address Democrats’ priorities, Manchin became the most powerful man in Washington simply by becoming a stick in the mud. For the last six or seven months, there has really only been one story in Washington: what does Manchin want and how can Democrats oblige him? There was also Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but she never loomed as large as her obstreperous colleague from West Virginia. 

And what Manchin wanted, Manchin got. Bernie Sanders wanted a $3.5 trillion package, but Democrats knew it wouldn’t get past Manchin, so it was whittled down to $2.2 trillion. But that still wasn’t enough. Manchin wanted $1.75 trillion. So the Democrats huffed and puffed and squeezed their wishlist into $1.75 trillion. But Manchin still wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to cut family leave, so the Democrats cut family leave. Nancy Pelosi, to appease her left flank, put it back into the House version, knowing full well that it would not survive the Senate because Manchin didn’t want it and if Manchin didn’t want it, it wasn’t going to happen. Manchin did want the bipartisan infrastructure bill uncoupled from Build Back Better, and so it was uncoupled, despite the anger of the left wing of the House Democrats, six of whom voted against the infrastructure bill in protest. 

But such is the math of Washington: in a Senate that is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, one senator who doesn’t want something to happen becomes more powerful than the 49 other Democratic senators who do, and that’s certainly more powerful than six votes in the House, where the party can withstand a few more casualties. 

This is why the rumors, which return as predictably as the seasons, that Manchin will abandon the Democratic party are foolish. They speak more to a Democratic perception that Manchin is a turncoat, a Republican in Democratic clothing, and that, in the words of the Democratic Senate staffer, “he just doesn’t share our values.” (“I mean, what the fuck is a member of our caucus doing sitting in Mitch McConnell’s office three times a week?” the staffer added. “What the fuck is that?”) They amplify Democratic insecurities that they’re the gang who couldn’t shoot straight, that they don’t have the kind of party discipline that Republicans do, or that, in the words of the G.O.P. aide, “they’re not very good at this.”

Besides, what could the Republicans offer Manchin? Chairing a powerful committee? He already has that, chairing the powerful Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. If he were to become a Republican, Manchin would have far less power as one of 51 Republican senators. He would have even less as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. Under the current arrangement, he is the one senator Democrats need to unlock a magic and extremely ephemeral majority. It’s like he’s the magic ingredient without which the flower that blooms every twenty years will not blossom and so his whims must be gently attended to. 

Even now, the White House is walking back a scathing statement penned by Jen Psaki and signed off on by Biden, fired off in the heat of Sunday’s rage and frustration. Even after all this, Manchin will be wooed and apologized to because the Democrats need him, both to pass some salvaged, Frankenstein, face-saving version of BBB (which they will most likely do), and for pretty much anything else they want to get done before the midterms sweep them out of congressional power. Even if they hate him now, Democrats still need him, and as long as they need him, Manchin gets what he wants.

Who would give up that kind of power?

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT