Good Sunday morning. I'm Eliana Johnson, your guest Playbook host and the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, where I spend a lot of my time with conservatives, Republicans and MAGA-heads. Here's what they're talking about right now, starting with the eleventh-hour PENCE-TRUMP breakup. — Long derided as a toady and mocked for his obsequiousness, the veep said no mas after President Donald Trump tried to bulldoze him into overturning the election results, in part by convincing him that the Constitution allowed him to do so. I'm told that Team Pence, led by counsel GREG JACOB, put considerable time and thought into the letter that made the split official: "It is my considered judgment," Pence wrote, "that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not." The big question for the GOP going forward is how last week's events will reorder Republican politics. Specifically, how much power will Trump wield after he leaves office? Republicans, at least the ones I spoke with, are unanimous in the view that Trump's role in inciting his diehards has undermined his influence. The question is how much. Some say that we've lived through plenty of Trump scandals that haven't loosened his grip on the party. But before the election, Trump had a claim to a series of accomplishments Republicans could tout — from overseeing the confirmation of hundreds of new federal judges and three Supreme Court justices to defying conventional wisdom on the Middle East and China in ways that are likely to endure, at least in the GOP. That won't be his legacy. Rather, I suspect any accomplishments will be entirely overshadowed by his unwillingness to concede and his decision to incite a mob. As a practical matter, his role in losing the Republican Senate majority demonstrated that there can be a political cost for standing with Trump. BUT … Trump and his sons have threatened to campaign against incumbent Republicans who defied him last week, and you'd have to be a fool to underestimate the soon-to-be-ex-president's appetite for revenge. Those involved with the Tea Party primary challenges a decade ago on both sides caution that primarying incumbent lawmakers takes real money and organization. They expressed skepticism about Trump's ability to do that successfully. Then again, look at what happened to Jeff Sessions (though he wasn't an incumbent). Some in the party are calculating that even if Trump's base shrinks, it will nonetheless be quite valuable to have in a Republican primary. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Florida Sen. Rick Scott, both of whom backed the election challenges, share the same political consultant: OnMessage. BEFORE WE GET THERE, Trump and the rest of us have the next 10 days to worry about. The challenges of impeachment (read POLITICO's story on the latest thinking among Dems) and the 25th Amendment have been pretty thoroughly discussed. But there's a third option that many Republican lawmakers are already employing. One GOP strategist termed this the "wink, wink, nod, nod" strategy, by which lawmakers simply treat VP Mike Pence as president. To wit: The Washington Post reports that Senate Majority Leader MITCH MCCONNELL "has told fellow senators and other confidants that he does not plan to speak to Trump again." The Pence-first approach got a trial run Wednesday when he took the lead in deploying the National Guard. On a phone call with congressional leaders from the secure location to which he was whisked away, Pence said he would call acting SecDef Chris Miller and Chair of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley to get things moving. Lawmakers had expressed to him frustration at the delays. "We were in the secure facility and the VP was gathering the leaders on the phone to get a status report and make sure they were OK and to discuss how quickly they could get back in," Pence chief of staff Marc Short told me. "Some expressed frustration there'd been a call for the National Guard and it hadn't yet been deployed; Pence volunteered to help and spoke to Miller and Milley." A couple other nuggets from my notebook: — GEORGIA AUTOPSY: Before Wednesday's tragedy, Republicans were well into dissecting what went wrong in Georgia. Trump's role in the losses is a hotly debated topic. He told Kelly Loeffler before he landed in Georgia for a final rally on Monday that if she didn't back the Electoral College challenges, he would "do a number on her" from the stage, according to a source familiar with the events. The president's refusal to concede also undermined the GOP's argument that they needed to keep the Senate to put a check on Joe Biden and the Democrats. Instead, enough voters apparently decided that Trump and Republicans were the ones who needed to be hemmed in. One GOP pollster involved in the races told me that Loeffler was narrowly ahead 72 hours before Election Day. But the release of Trump's call to pressure the Georgia elections chief, combined with the flood of Republican senators who followed Hawley in vowing to challenge Biden's win, changed everything. "When you're in a really close race the imagery of the last 48 hours makes a difference because you don't have to move that many voters," the pollster said. — OVERLOOKED: Tucked into the omnibus spending bill that passed in December is a provision creating a $30 million fund for "extraordinary protective services." A senior State Department official says the money will provide for private security for Trump administration officials who have been the subject of death threats from Iranian officials seeking to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani. They include Secretary of State MIKE POMPEO, MILLEY, former Iran envoy BRIAN HOOK and national security adviser ROBERT O'BRIEN. Given the events of the past week, including the harassment of Sens. MITT ROMNEY and LINDSEY GRAHAM, it's worth thinking about how long it'll be until we see a similar fund for the protection of lawmakers. — LIGHT TRAFFIC ON WEST EXEC AVENUE: Those who've visited the Old Executive Office Building recently describe it as something of a ghost town, with newspapers sitting outside locked office doors well after 9 a.m. It's hard to know the extent to which that's a product of the remote work environment and an intentional staggering of departures as opposed to resignations, but the vision of tumbleweeds blowing through the corridors of power says something about where we're at. Many Republicans not named Stephen Miller and Johnny McEntee have fled the White House — and there have been a lot more resignations than reported. — DEPT. OF BIGGER FISH TO FRY: Republicans are buzzing about a movement afoot within the Arizona Republican Party to censure Cindy McCain. A formal resolution dubbing her "a troubled individual" was taken up by a very receptive Maricopa County GOP on Saturday and heads to the state party later this month. Cindy McCain backed Biden in the election, and said in response that she's "a proud lifelong Republican and will continue to support candidates who put country over party and stand for the rule of law." — WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE; WITH CHARITY FOR ALL: | 
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