| | | | |  | | By Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza and Rachael Bade | | Presented by |  | | | With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine
|  | DRIVING THE DAY | | ALL POLITICS IS FAMILIAL — The war that lawmakers have waged against TikTok has finally come home to roost — literally, to lawmakers’ homes. WSJ’s Natalie Andrews has a fun read that includes stories from Sens. TODD YOUNG (R-Ind.) and JOHN FETTERMAN (D-Pa.) and Reps. JOSH GOTTHEIMER (D-N.J.), NANCY MACE (R-S.C.) and HILLARY SCHOLTEN (D-Mich.) about how the young ones in their lives have been rankled by their recent votes. Scholten “was in the middle-school pickup line when one of her son’s friends asked, ‘Are you the one who’s banning TikTok?’” Fetterman: “I’m driving home and [my tween daughter] sent me some texts, and it was ‘please don’t destroy TikTok, I’m going to get bullied.’”
|  This morning, there are three distinct stories on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that are worth your time. | Matt Rourke, File/AP Photo | KENNEDY IN THE SPOTLIGHT — Over the last week, there’s either been a shift in ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.’s media strategy, or reporters are eager for something to cover other than President JOE BIDEN vs. DONALD TRUMP — or both — because the man has been everywhere. This morning, there are three distinct stories on Kennedy that are worth your time. 1. The “spoiler” angle: In 2016, Trump flipped Wisconsin, beating HILLARY CLINTON by about 23,000 votes. In 2020, Biden flipped it back, beating Trump about 20,000 votes. One big difference between those two cycles: There wasn’t much of a third-party campaign in Wisconsin in 2020. Kennedy is poised to change that. Andrew Bahl from Madison’s Capital Times has a smart look at the reality in the state. One excerpt that will probably cause heart palpitations among Democrats: “Five times in the last 100 years has a third-party candidate received more than 5% of the vote in Wisconsin. … Kennedy will not be the only third party candidate on the ballot in Wisconsin. Libertarians will have a candidate as well and the Green Party has secured ballot access for their presidential candidate, likely JILL STEIN … This will inject a new wrinkle that Biden’s campaign did not have to confront in Wisconsin in 2020, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the Green Party candidate, HOWIE HAWKINS, must stay off the ballot because of paperwork concerns.” 2. The “money and enthusiasm” angle: Kennedy’s campaign — drawing on the candidate’s “deep ties with anti-vaccine and environmental activism coupled with his campaign’s dedication to new media” — is activating a whole new type of political donor, our colleague Brittany Gibson writes: people without a history of making donations. “Roughly 21,000 donors have given Kennedy’s campaign at least $200 since he declared his independent run in October, and a POLITICO analysis found that 74 percent of them did not make any political donations during the 2020 cycle. And interviews with numerous Kennedy backers reveal it’s made up of a powerful bloc of people not only drawn to Kennedy but turned off by the general election matchup.” What’s drawing them? It’s a mix of his views and the old Kennedy mystique. One former registered Republican tells Brittany that only Kennedy is talking about fighting “Big Pharma,” a nod at his (thoroughly scientifically discredited) crusade against vaccines. Another donor says that she was drawn by the sense that he has “this great, this most pure intention, like his uncle and his dad,” referencing former President JOHN F. KENNEDY and Sen. ROBERT F. KENNEDY, respectively. 3. The “running mate” angle: On Tuesday, Kennedy is set to unveil his choice of running mate at a rally in Oakland, California. Who’ll it be? One name has consistently emerged as the frontrunner: NICOLE SHANAHAN, a tech attorney from the Bay Area. Shanahan comes in for the deep-dive treatment this morning from the L.A. Times’ James Rainey, who unpacks some of what might make the 38-year-old political novice a compelling choice: She “recalls being raised on food stamps in a home where both parents struggled to find work. She bussed tables at age 12, before education powered her to a career as a lawyer and entrepreneur, who started a company while still in her 20s.” There is, of course, another — more obvious — reason Kennedy could choose her: Shanahan is extraordinarily wealthy. The former wife of Google co-founder SERGEY BRIN, she’s in a position to “help fund the expensive and daunting effort to gather signatures to qualify the Kennedy ticket to appear on 50 state ballots” — which could dramatically complicate Biden’s path to reelection, with Kennedy potentially playing spoiler in several swing states. Good Sunday morning, and Happy Palm Sunday. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.
| | A message from the American Bankers Association: Credit card points and cash back rewards help Americans save, travel and shop — but some in Congress want to end those benefits, just like they shut down debit card rewards in 2011. The misguided Durbin-Marshall bill would eliminate credit card rewards, reduce access to credit cards and jeopardize consumer privacy. Don’t let lawmakers take away your hard-earned rewards just to pad the profits of corporate mega retailers. Tell Congress to oppose Durbin-Marshall. Act now. | | | LEDE OF THE DAY — From NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess: “Donald J. Trump is expected to spend his Monday morning in the courtroom of a New York judge who might soon preside over his criminal trial and, ultimately, throw him behind bars. And that’s not even the legal predicament that worries Mr. Trump most that day.” That other legal predicament? New York AG TISH JAMES could begin to collect as soon as tomorrow on his $454 million judgment in his civil fraud suit. The gist: “To avoid a mortal threat to the Trump Organization, Mr. Trump must persuade another company to post a bond on his behalf, promising that it will cover the judgment if he loses a pending appeal and fails to pay. Yet Mr. Trump’s lawyers in court papers said that securing the bond would be a ‘practical impossibility,’ because he would need to pledge some $550 million in cash and liquid investments as collateral to the bond company — an admission that laid bare the former president’s cash crunch. Unless Mr. Trump strikes an 11th-hour deal, Ms. James could freeze his bank accounts, and begin the long and complicated process of seizing some of his properties.” Thought bubble: Politically, this is likely something of a mixed bag. Trump’s loyalists won’t be dissuaded; they’ve swallowed whole his claims that he’s being treated unfairly by a partisan legal system. Trump’s detractors don’t need more reasons to detest him; they’re already motivated — though will surely feel schadenfreude. But we do have to wonder if the sight of potential liens or property seizures could damage Trump’s brand in a way that undercuts the central narrative that has undergirded his political appeal: that he’s a successful businessman adept at striking deals, able to walk between the raindrops without getting wet. SUNDAY BEST … — VP KAMALA HARRIS on Russia’s insinuation that Ukraine may have been involved in the Moscow terrorist attack, on ABC’s “This Week”: “No, there is no, whatsoever, any evidence and, in fact, what we know to be the case is that ISIS-K is actually, by all accounts, responsible for what happened.” More from Kelly Garrity — Rep. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) on whether she’d vote to save Speaker MIKE JOHNSON after a motion to vacate, on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “I am not inclined to vote for a Speaker Johnson. I’m not inclined to vote for an individual for speaker who doesn’t believe in women’s rights, doesn’t believe in rights to bodily autonomy, who has supported overturning a presidential election. My vote would most likely be for a Speaker [HAKEEM] JEFFRIES … For any Democrat inclined, I don’t think we do that for free. And I don’t think that we do that out of sympathy for Republicans.” — Rep. CHIP ROY (R-Texas) on Johnson’s fitness to be speaker and the motion to vacate, on “State of the Union”: “I can promise you, if you put a Ukraine bill on the floor and you haven’t secured the border, there’s going to be a problem within the ranks on Capitol Hill.” — Sen. MARCO RUBIO (R-Fla.) on Trump’s claim that Jews who vote Democratic hate their own religion, on “This Week”: “Being your religion and being pro-Israel can be two separate things. … If you want Israel to stop, what it basically means is that Hamas will continue to be able to threaten Israel and so will Hezbollah. … This is an existential battle. And anyone who doesn’t understand that is, frankly, whether they know it or not, an enemy of Israel, or at least on the side of what could lead to the destruction of the Jewish state.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
- “How to beat the backlash that threatens the liberal revolution,” by WaPo’s Fareed Zakaria
- “Pennsylvania Swings to Joe Biden’s Jobs,” by Bloomberg’s Matthew Winkler
- “It’s the right time for austerity,” by Slow Boring’s Matthew Yglesias
- “The case for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay,” by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Shawn Fain in WaPo
- “War-Gaming for Democracy,” by The Atlantic’s Elliot Ackerman
- “How FDR Made Republican Isolationists Look Silly with a Simple Rhyme,” by Charles Sykes in POLITICO Magazine
- “Two years ago, we had a baby formula crisis. Let’s hope lawmakers remember,” by WaPo’s Alyssa Rosenberg
- “Communist Cuba Is on the Brink of Collapse,” by Bloomberg’s Juan Pablo Spinetto
- “The Most Conservative Jurists in America Have Lost the Supreme Court,” by The New Republic’s Matt Ford
- “The Online Degradation of Women and Girls That We Meet With a Shrug,” by NYT’s Nicholas Kristof
| | | | A message from the American Bankers Association:   | | | | | WHAT'S HAPPENING TODAY | | At the White House Biden will leave New Castle, Delaware, in the afternoon to return to the White House. Harris has nothing on her public schedule.
| | | | | PLAYBOOK READS | | | | 
President Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, cruised to another easy primary victory yesterday in Louisiana. | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO | 9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR 1. ELECTION DAY: With all suspense now sapped from the presidential primaries, Biden and Trump cruised to another easy victory each yesterday in Louisiana. Missouri Democrats also went to the polls, where Biden was expected to notch a big win, but results there won’t be released until tomorrow. More from the AP Meanwhile, California is still tallying races from its primary three weeks ago. Yesterday, Democrat DEREK TRAN advanced to become the challenger to GOP Rep. MICHELLE STEEL in Orange County. The personal injury and consumer lawyer, who showed significant fundraising ability in the primary, narrowly edged out fellow Democrat KIM NGUYEN-PENALOZA by a few hundred votes; she endorsed him yesterday, though the AP still hasn’t called the race. Steel has proven hard for Democrats to dislodge, but she’s still a top target for the party in November. 2. YELLEN TRAVELIN’: “Janet Yellen to make second trip to China next month,” by Daniel Lippman and Phelim Kine: “[JANET] YELLEN’s trip in the coming weeks will be a follow-up to her meetings in Beijing in July that resulted in the formation of new Economic and Financial Working Groups … Yellen’s travel plan reflects the administration’s efforts to sustain a still-fragile stability in bilateral ties.” 3. AN ORIGIN OF 2024’S DISCONTENTS: One of the most fundamental factors driving the broad malaise in the American body politic is at once obvious and under-discussed: the ongoing hangover from the Covid pandemic, NYT’s Lisa Lerer, Jennifer Medina and Reid Epstein report. The trauma from the huge disruption to everyone’s lives — and from more than 1.1 million Americans dead — has played a major role in voters’ sense of unease and deepened distrust of institutions. That’s before you even get to its impact on inflation, crime, vacant downtowns, educational decline, health issues and more. The upshot is an ongoing political drag on Biden, despite his stewardship of the pandemic recovery. George Makari and Richard Friedman tell the same story in a new Atlantic piece, which argues that experts have struggled to account for our “era of bad feelings” because they overlook the fact that “Biden is paying the price for America’s unprocessed COVID grief.” 4. KNOWING RYAN WALTERS: “The State Superintendent at the Forefront of the GOP’s Education Crusade,” by Juan Perez Jr. in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for POLITICO Magazine: “Wielding a doctrine of brimstone-salted classroom policy, he is the incarnation of a post-pandemic GOP school takeover attempt that has boiled over from local boards to higher-profile jobs like state superintendent and beyond. … [But] his views have alienated an unexpected cohort of former allies and fellow conservatives in Oklahoma — and prompted a battery of unflattering coverage from a dogged corps of local journalists.”
| | | | A message from the American Bankers Association:   | | | 5. FANI WILLIS DEFIANT: The embattled Fulton County, Georgia, DA told CNN that the recent brouhaha — and legal hot water — around her relationship with prosecutor NATHAN WADE won’t further delay or derail her massive 2020 election subversion racketeering case against Trump and others. “I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve done,” Willis said. “My team’s been continuing to work … I don’t feel like we’ve been slowed down at all. I do think that there are efforts to slow down this train, but the train is coming.” 6. WHAT JOSH PAUL IS UP TO: “From Iowa, Washington’s top Gaza dissenter plots a second act,” by WaPo’s Hannah Allam in Grinnell: “Paul said he began to see a future where he remained in the United States, using his newfound platform in service of a lobbying effort to ‘rebalance’ Middle East policy. He needed to hit pause and think strategically, he said, but that was difficult in the Washington fishbowl, where passersby had begun to recognize him from television. When an invitation to visit Grinnell arrived, Paul said, it was the first … overture from a university as tensions over the war turned campuses into political battlegrounds.” 7. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: In the latest negotiations to try to pause the Israel-Hamas war, the U.S. has put forth a proposal for how many Palestinian prisoners should be released for every hostage Hamas sets free, an Israeli official told Reuters’ Dan Williams and Nidal Al-Mughrabi. Meanwhile, the U.S. is grappling with challenges in getting humanitarian aid to Gaza via the new maritime channel, NBC’s Courtney Kube and Carol Lee report. The Biden administration has insisted that U.S. troops won’t actually set foot on land to distribute aid in Gaza, but other alternatives — using guards from different countries or private companies — carry their own security risks for U.S. personnel. 8. DISINFORMATION DIGEST: “The disinformation war has taken a toll, but researchers feel a shift,” by NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny: “After weathering a yearslong political and legal assault, researchers who study disinformation say they see reasons to be cautiously hopeful as their efforts heat up ahead of the 2024 election.” Related read: “Arizona expects to be back at the center of election attacks. Its top officials are going on offense,” by AP’s Ali Swenson in Phoenix 9. THE BRAVE NEW WORLD: Medical malpractice reform is due for a new twist as artificial intelligence makes its way into the hospital: Who’s at fault if an AI tool makes a mistake when a doctor uses it for diagnostics or treatment? Daniel Payne reports that the issue is starting to bubble up for Congress, with doctors pitted against health tech companies and some hospitals — but the old partisan battle lines on medical malpractice may not apply. These days, both Democrats and Republicans may be more inclined to side with the doctors. “There’s no legislation to do that yet, but lawmakers have begun looking into it.”
| | | | | | PLAYBOOKERS | | | Ronna McDaniel may not be welcome on MSNBC. And Chuck Todd has thoughts about her being welcome on “Meet the Press.” Lisa Murkowski isn’t ruling out leaving the GOP to become an independent. Dakota Adams, estranged son of Stewart Rhodes, is running for the Montana state House as a Democrat. Joe Biden isn’t happy about the new pride flag ban at U.S. embassies. Megan Bates-Apper and Andrew Bates made it big at the North Carolina State game. SPOTTED: Donald Trump having dinner with Miriam Adelson in a private room at Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening. (h/t Daniel Lippman) OUT AND ABOUT — Ali Vitali celebrated her birthday yesterday at St. Vincent Wine, where guests came dressed in their ’90s and early-2000s best. SPOTTED: Liz Landers, Fin Gómez and Sarah March-Gómez, Andy and Elizabeth Harnik, Brian Gilman, Jonathan Kott, Amanda Marsh, Matt Beynon, Molly Roecker, Katherine Schneider and Adán Serna. — SPOTTED at a joint 40th birthday party last night for Liz Johnson, Elizabeth Falcone and Jan Beukelman at the home of Joe and Helen Milby: Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), British Ambassador Karen Pierce, Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason, Tammy Haddad, John McCarthy, Reema Dodin, Jackie Rooney, Josh Dawsey, Eli Yokley and Evan Hollander, Alex Edelman and Tony Polcari. ENGAGED — Evan Semones, an anchor producer at CNN for Jim Acosta and a POLITICO alum, proposed to Trisha Maharaj, an associate policy director at Indivisible, during a beachfront dinner in Phuket, Thailand, on Thursday. They met in January 2020 on Hinge and had their first date at the old Columbia Room bar. Pic … Another pic HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) (7-0) … Su-Lin Nichols … Mark Spengler … Matt Gorman of Targeted Victory … Ted Chiodo … CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan … Eugene Kang … Chandler Goule of the National Wheat Growers Association … Rod O’Connor … Evan Feinberg of Stand Together … Robert Hoffman … NBC’s Dareh Gregorian … Molly Wilkinson of American Airlines … Sarah Gilmore of the Retail Industry Leaders Association … Stephens’ Vu Ritchie … former Reps. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio) and Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) … Aharon Friedman … Navy JAG Hannah Sherman … Staci Maiers … Bloomberg’s Aaron Rutkoff … Jeanette Manfra … State Department’s Josh Cohen … Bob Crowe … Erin Murphy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies … Elise Sidamon-Eristoff … Fred Menachem of ThriveDx … Kirami Bah Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath. Correction: Yesterday’s Playbook misidentified the state that Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips represents. It is Minnesota.
| | A message from the American Bankers Association: Credit card rewards are more valuable than ever right now, with high prices and inflation still stinging our pockets — but some in Congress want to take away those rewards points and cash back in order to pad the profits of corporate megastores. The misguided Durbin-Marshall bill would end popular credit card rewards programs that benefit consumers and small businesses. The legislation would impose network routing requirements on banks that issue credit cards, prioritizing cheaper networks pushed by mega retailers that could compromise consumers’ personal information in the process. Tell Congress to leave your credit card rewards alone and stop meddling in the nation’s convenient, safe and trusted payments system. It’s time for lawmakers to protect your points and stand by consumers by opposing Durbin-Marshall. Act now. | | | | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook family Playbook | Playbook PM | California Playbook | Florida Playbook | Illinois Playbook | Massachusetts Playbook | New Jersey Playbook | New York Playbook | Ottawa Playbook | Brussels Playbook | London Playbook View all our political and policy newsletters | | Follow us | | | | |
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