| | | |  | | By Adam Wren | Presented by The U.S. Chamber of Commerce | With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine Happy Saturday. Elon Musk had a week of setbacks, including failing to cancel daylight saving time, meaning you need to get ready to set your clocks forward one hour before 2 a.m. Sunday. The vicissitudes of life come for us all. Drop me a line: awren@politico.com.
|  | DRIVING THE DAY | | HEADS UP: House Republicans are expected to release their potentially shutdown-averting, seven-month spending bill as soon as today. With Democrats firmly opposed, they’ll need virtually every GOP member to pass it. If they do, expect the House to make an early escape next week — jamming Senate Democrats. Follow POLITICO’s budget and appropriations experts for all the latest NEW CORRIDORS COLUMN: “Gavin Newsom Jump-Started a Conversation Democrats Need to Have,” by POLITICO’s Rachael Bade: “Since losing in November, the party has sidestepped a reckoning on transgender rights.”
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Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s decision earned her withering and viciously personal criticism from the president’s allies. | Greg Nash/Pool via AP Photo, file | CHASING AMY: In its restless quest to display total dominance over Washington, the MAGA movement this week found a new and unlikely object of scorn: Justice Amy Coney Barrett. You’d be forgiven if you missed how one of Donald Trump’s own court picks — particularly one who has rarely strayed from the conservative majority — got crossways with his supporters. Barrett’s great judicial apostasy, as the very-online MAGA right sees it, came when she joined the 5-4 majority that ruled against Trump in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. Essentially, as our senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein explains it to Playbook, she joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the liberal justices to lift a Trump administration hold on almost $2 billion owed to foreign-aid contractors and groups. Not exactly a major MAGA bucket list item nor one of Trump’s applause lines that killed at his campaign rallies. Barrett had already managed to get on the wrong side of the MAGA folks by siding against Jan. 6 defendants last June, when the high court struck down the Justice Department’s theory for using an obstruction statute against hundreds who took part in the riot. Even her concurrence in the Trump immunity case was seen as heresy. Her latest supposed apostasy has now earned her withering and viciously personal criticism from the president’s allies. Mike Cernovich called her a “DEI hire.” Over on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, MAGA legal bulldog Mike Davis, a former law clerk to another Trump nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch, called her “a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Laura Loomer, the far-right influencer, posted a photo of Barrett’s family, including two of her adopted children from Haiti. “When judges take off their robes and climb into the political arena and throw political punches, they should expect political counterpunches,” Davis told Playbook. But it wasn’t just a ruling that had MAGA adherents up in arms over Barrett this week. It was a video reaction shared on X by Rogan O’Handley, the influencer known as DC_Draino who himself was just invited to the White House, of Barrett looking “very bitter” at Trump while he greeted people amid his trip to Capitol Hill this week. For the MAGA right, the video seemed to evince a disloyalty Barrett harbors toward Trump. “I think that she doesn’t owe any special loyalty to the president who appointed her, but she certainly shouldn’t show public disdain to any president, let alone the president who appointed her,” Davis told Playbook. Disdain? Is that what Davis reads into the video of Barrett reacting to Trump during his joint reaction? “Yes,” Davis said, “and that’s why I’m unloading.” The episode and what it says about this larger political moment is, at once, telling, remarkable and unsurprising. Barrett came of age at a moment when the lodestar of conservatism was the cause of ending abortion; now the overriding organizing principle is MAGA loyalty. (Barrett did not respond to a request for comment that Playbook sent to the court’s public information officer.) “It’s a sign of just how much the MAGA right measures officials in fealty rather than principle.” our senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney told us. The anti-Barrett campaign also underscores the power Trump’s online base thinks it has to influence a co-equal branch of government, while revealing the limits it’s facing: “I think there’s frustration among the MAGA faithful about their inability to cow the courts the way they can often spook Congress,” Kyle added. For what it’s worth, Davis doesn’t think the ref-working is hopeless: “It’s amazing: When you use fiery rhetoric and Republican-on-Republican rhetorical violence, you can get the mainstream media’s attention, which gets the Supreme Court justices’ attention,” said Davis, who added that Barrett “isn’t a liberal. She’s not the next [David] Souter.” Where is all this headed? What does it mean if Trump gets another SCOTUS pick? “In the current political climate, any perceived disloyalty on the part of a Supreme Court justice means the litmus tests and vetting — the ideological straitjacket, really — for the next nominee to fill a SCOTUS vacancy will be that much more intense,” Josh says. Kyle points us to another thing to watch: talk among Trump allies about ignoring court orders. “Such talk has not been endorsed by the White House, but every time we see an adverse ruling, the drumbeat becomes a clamor,” Cheney said. “If we start seeing loud calls to ignore the Supreme Court itself, that’s when we’re really on the precipice of a crisis.” RELATED READING: “Veteran legal conservatives rush to Justice Barrett’s defense amid MAGA backlash,” by CNN’s John Fritze: “She’s been in the vanguard of conservative jurisprudence on abortion, racial preferences, the administrative state, religious freedom, Trump immunity, guns and the Second Amendment,” said Leonard Leo, who advised Trump on Supreme Court nominees during the president’s first term.
| | | | A message from The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents agree: make the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent.
See why voters support permanent tax relief. Learn more. | | | 9 THINGS THAT STUCK WITH US 1. IN THE DOGE HOUSE: A new lawsuit from 20 Democratic-led states challenges the mass firings of probationary civil servants across federal agencies, arguing that the government lied about laying them off for performance reasons, per WaPo’s Katie Mettler. But the purge continues: The Justice Department ousted more senior career officials, including firing its pardon attorney and placing the head of its internal ethics office on leave, NYT’s Devlin Barrett and William Rashbaum report. (This comes as the White House, particularly Stephen Miller, has increasingly exerted control over the traditionally independent DOJ and FBI, WSJ’s Ryan Barber, Josh Dawsey and Sadie Gurman report.) The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has started firing officials who took part in diversity programs, Reuters’ Jonathan Landay reports, though they were given a chance to appeal. Top experts who prevent invasive pests from destroying U.S. crops have been fired, NBC’s Suzy Khimm reports. DOGE bites man: The Defense Department has begun freezing civilian employees’ credit cards, per AP’s Lolita Baldor. The EPA announced that any spending above $50,000 will now have to get the green light from the Department of Government Efficiency, AP’s Matthew Daly reports. Moves like those have many federal workers very skeptical of Trump’s move this week to narrow Musk’s mandate and put firing decisions in the hands of Cabinet secretaries, POLITICO’s Holly Otterbein, Jordan Wolman, Marcia Brown, Nahal Toosi and Sophie Gardner report. “I don’t trust a word of it,” one employee says of the new guardrails. The fallout: At HUD, $60 million mostly for community development groups to build affordable housing has been put on ice, AP’s Jesse Bedayn reports. Meanwhile, the foreign aid freeze has hampered international efforts to track Iran’s nuclear development, NYT’s William Broad reports. And NYT’s Ruth Maclean and Saikou Jammeh run down just how devastating aid cuts will be to sub-Saharan Africa, from humanitarian relief in war zones to HIV prevention. 2. THE ADAMS FAMILY: Paul Clement, the court-appointed outside lawyer analyzing the Justice Department’s extraordinary bid to drop its Eric Adams corruption prosecution, advised Judge Dale Ho to dismiss the charges for good, POLITICO’s Erica Orden reports. Clement found that Ho would not have the authority to make prosecutors continue the case, but he said the judge shouldn’t allow DOJ to retain the right to bring the case back in the future: That could give the Trump administration leverage to threaten Adams. Meanwhile, DOJ leaders Todd Blanche and Emil Bove attacked former prosecutor Damian Williams, who brought the Adams case, by publicizing some internal messages in a court filing to suggest he’d acted improperly, NYT’s Jonah Bromwich, William Rashbaum and Michael Rothfeld report. But the selective excerpting made it hard to assess them fully. 3. TETE-A-TETE: “RFK Jr. plans to meet with Big Food,” by POLITICO’s Marcia Brown and Adam Cancryn: “[HHS Secretary] Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to meet with top executives of several major food brands on Monday … Senior leaders from General Mills and PepsiCo are among those expected to participate … Kennedy agreed to meet with the food executives at the suggestion of the White House … [A]s of Friday, the attendees had yet to agree on a meeting agenda, a dispute that is dividing [the Consumer Brands Association’s] board and could potentially muck up the meeting.”
| | | | A message from The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act reduced and simplified the federal tax burden on families and businesses, stimulated economic growth, created jobs, and enhanced the global competitiveness of American companies.
See why voters support making it permanent. Learn more. | | | 4. UKRAINE LATEST: Despite his threat of sanctions against Russia, Trump’s concrete actions continue to boost Russia and undermine Ukraine in its war against Moscow’s invasion, in an attempt to force Kyiv into cease-fire talks. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency yesterday choked off the sharing of satellite imagery with Ukraine, per NYT’s Eve Sampson. In response to that and the end of other U.S. intelligence being shared with Kyiv, European allies like the U.K., France and Germany will try to make up the intel shortfall — but “they are unlikely to be able to replicate the scope and scale,” POLITICO’s Amy Mackinnon, Jamie Dettmer and Paul McLeary report. Quote of the day: As Russia has intensified its assault on Ukraine this week — most recently killing at least 14 people, including children, overnight — Trump said yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “doing what anybody else would do.” More from WaPo 5. MEEKS’ WILL: “Top lawmaker blocking US arms sales to UAE over role in Sudan war,” scooped by POLITICO’s Robbie Gramer and Joe Gould: “Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) has quietly blocked arms sales to the United Arab Emirates since late last year, and plans to make that hold public as he introduces a bill to take action against those fueling the war in Sudan. … It’s also unclear whether President Donald Trump would abide by such a hold. … Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Rep. Sara Jacobs of California plan to introduce their own separate legislation on the matter in the coming week.” 6. TALES FROM THE CRYPTO: At an inaugural White House cryptocurrency summit yesterday, Trump heralded the industry and declared that he wants the U.S. to be the world’s “Bitcoin superpower,” per the NYT. Taking a step back, WSJ’s Rebecca Ballhaus, Josh Dawsey and Eliza Collins have a buzzy deep dive into how Trump came around to supporting crypto last year after long calling it a scam. He was convinced in part by a flood of industry donations to his campaign; arguments that he could reach young men and Black voters by embracing crypto; advocacy from Barron Trump and Paul Manafort; and the possibility of personal profit. His meme coin deal “has generated around $350 million worth of cryptocurrency USDC for entities affiliated with him.” Also eyeing a comeback: Former Democratic donor and imprisoned fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to lay the groundwork for seeking a pardon from Trump, WSJ’s Ben Cohen, Alexander Osipovich and James Fanelli report. The crypto billionaire’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show — part of an attempted rebrand as a Republican — “hadn’t been approved by the Federal Bureau of Prisons” and briefly landed him in solitary confinement. 7. THE LOAN LURCH: “Trump Seeks to Bar Student Loan Relief to Workers Aiding Migrants and Trans Kids,” by NYT’s Stacy Cowley: “His order to restrict the [student loan forgiveness program for public servants] appears to target groups supporting undocumented immigrants, diversity initiatives or gender-affirming care for children, among others. … Such changes must typically go through a formal rule-making process. … But the Trump administration has frequently acted in defiance of apparent legal limits.”
| | | | CALIFORNIA DECODED: The technology industry and its key characters are driving the national political narrative right now, but it is also a uniquely California story. To understand how the Golden State is defining tech policy and politics within its borders and beyond, we’ve launched POLITICO Pro Technology: California Decoded. This new daily newsletter will track how industry players in Silicon Valley are trying to influence state and national lawmakers – and how government officials are encouraging or foiling those figures. Sign up now to get a limited, free trial of this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. | | | | | 8. ANTITRUST THE PROCESS: In at least one case, the Trump administration appears to be sticking with the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust approach to Big Tech. Justice Department lawyers maintained in a new filing that Google should be broken up because of its illegal online search monopoly, per NYT’s David McCabe. 9. BIG LOSS FOR POLLING: “Monmouth University will shutter its gold-standard polling institute,” by the New Jersey Globe’s Joey Fox and David Wildstein: “Some university leaders felt it was losing too much money while not attracting enough students, and any poll that Monmouth released that ultimately ended up being inaccurate — always a hazard of the polling trade — was seen as a possible stain on the university’s image. … [W]ith two competitive House races on the horizon in 2026, it’s possible that there won’t be any independent polling to rely on whatsoever.” CLICKER — “The nation’s cartoonists on the week in politics,” edited by Matt Wuerker — 17 funnies
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Bill Bramhall - New York Daily News | GREAT WEEKEND READS: — “The Lost Do-Gooders,” by Nick Summers in N.Y. Mag: “Most Ivy Leaguers in civil service will land jobs post-DOGE. But they may not find a new calling.” — “He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel,” by NYT’s Ruth Graham: “And the feeling isn’t good. Aaron Renn has gained a following by warning that the U.S. is currently a ‘negative world’ for Christianity.” — “Will Harvard Bend or Break?” by The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller: “Free-speech battles and pressure from Washington threaten America’s oldest university — and the soul of higher education.” — “The great pretender: how Ahmed al-Sharaa won Syria,” by Nicolas Pelham in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine: “Syria’s new president is a chameleon. Is that enough to rule the Middle East’s most volatile country?” — “How the Terrorgram Collective’s Neo-Nazi Influencers Groomed a Teen to Kill,” by A.C. Thompson, James Bandler and Lukáš Diko for ProPublica, Frontline and the Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak: “Juraj Krajčík subscribed to at least 49 extremist Telegram chats and channels, many of them nodes in the Terrorgram network, before he killed two people at an LGBTQ+ bar.” — “When I lost my intuition,” by Ronald Dworkin in Aeon: “For years, I practised medicine with cool certainty, comfortable with life-and-death decisions. Then, one day, I couldn’t.” — “Madness, Melancholy, or Murder: An Ancient English Farm’s 50-Year-Old Mystery,” Longreads: “Andrew Chamings returns to his childhood farmland to investigate the mystifying deaths of the Luxton siblings. What really happened down that dark country lane?”
| | | | A message from The U.S. Chamber of Commerce:  
AdoAmericans overwhelmingly support making the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent, according to a new poll from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Learn more. | | | | | TALK OF THE TOWN | | Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo have been added to the Kennedy Center’s board. Marco Rubio and Thom Tillis helped Bill Belichick get the job coaching North Carolina, per ESPN. FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: Is Michael Wolff’s magical sales run for his gossipy Trump books coming to an end? Our colleague Daniel Lippman reports that his latest Trump tome, “All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America” ($32), sold around 3,000 print copies in its first week after publication, according to independent data from Circana BookScan. His first Trump book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” sold more than 25,000 copies its first week in 2018 and has racked up almost a million total sales, according to the same data source. “Siege: Trump Under Fire” sold 17,000 copies during its first week in 2019, and “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency” sold 24,000 copies upon publication in 2021. Asked why his latest Trump book wasn’t selling very well compared to his previous ones, Wolff texted Playbook, “No idea. None of those numbers for the other books are remotely accurate. New book is debuting on NYT bestseller list next week at #9.” Crown Publishing said in a statement that “All or Nothing,” citing its own data, had sold more than 9,000 copies in all formats since its publication on Feb. 25 and noted that the book was announced publicly only five days before its release date. PLAYBOOK METRO SECTION: “Inside Ned’s, the private club for a new generation of D.C. cool kids,” by WaPo’s Roxanne Roberts: “The London-based franchise aims for a modern take on Washington’s elite membership enclaves.” OUT AND ABOUT — Elias Law Group hosted its annual client reception Thursday evening at the National Archives Museum, where Marc Elias spoke about standing up for democracy and against authoritarianism. SPOTTED: Andie Levien, Brian Tyler Cohen, Julie Merz, Scott Fairchild, David Bergstein, Danielle Butterfield, Kevin McKeon, Stuart Perelmuter, Meghan Meehan-Draper, Miryam Lipper, Sean Rankin, Marina Jenkins, Nico Starr, Jill Shesol, Kim Rogers, Ashley Spillane, Leslie Martes and Michelle White. — SPOTTED at a Democratic Communicators Network “mix and mingle” event Thursday night at the UPS townhouse: Oriana González, Robert Jimison, Jackie Koppell, Andrew Solender, Ken Tran, Alexa Cooley, Hale Diamond, Earnestine Dawson and Matt Slavoski. — SPOTTED at a party hosted by Sally Quinn on Thursday night to celebrate Pamela Brown and Wolf Blitzer’s new CNN show: Virginia Moseley, Lynn Blitzer, Kaitlan Collins, Alison Starling and Peter Alexander, Tammy Haddad, Josh Dawsey, Phil Rucker, Josh Humphries, David Ignatius, Kristen Welker and John Hughes, Kevin Sullivan, Jeff Zeleny, Kasie Hunt and Matt Rivera, and Margaret Carlson. — At Politics & Prose last night, a “teach-in” about how to resist the Trump administration drew a big crowd. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), David Cole, Skye Perryman and Kelley Robinson were featured speakers. Raskin also raised a point of personal privilege to ask if anyone could give him a ride home to Takoma Park and got lots of volunteers. TRANSITIONS — The Treasury Department announced several new appointments, including Jonathan Blum as principal deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs, Mason Champion as deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs, tax and budget, Elliott Yoshio Hulse as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs (covering international affairs) and Stephen Sandora as counselor to the deputy secretary. … Stefani Jones is now director of cybersecurity programs at the Aspen Institute. She most recently was senior policy adviser at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) (5-0), Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) and Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.) … NBC’s Lester Holt … Adrian Saenz … Taylor Lustig … Evan Feigenbaum … Drew Nirenberg … Micah Barbour … Shanon Henry … Sarah Burke … Jeff Sonderman … Maggie Moore of Foreign Policy … AARP’s Ashley Wolos … former Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) … David Malpass … former Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) … POLITICO’s Emily Solomon and Andrew Holmes … Stephen Perkins of the American Conservation Coalition … New Heights Communications’ Morgan Snyder … Grace Evangelista … Robert Wolf THE SHOWS (Full Sunday show listings here): Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures”: President Donald Trump … Victoria Coates. CBS “Face the Nation”: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem … Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) … Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) … Canadian Ambassador Kirsten Hillman … Fiona Hill. NBC “Meet the Press”: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick … Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) … Steve Kornacki. Panel: Courtney Kube, Jonathan Martin, Symone Sanders Townsend and Marc Short. MSNBC “The Weekend”: Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) … David Miliband … Judge Susan Crawford. ABC “This Week”: National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett … Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) … Shawn Fain. Panel: Donna Brazile, Reince Priebus, Sarah Isgur and Faiz Shakir. CNN “State of the Union”: Adam Boehler … Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) … Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.). Panel: Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas), Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Ashley Allison and Brenda Gianiny. NewsNation “The Hill Sunday”: Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) … Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) … Gene Sperling and David Stockman. Panel: Andrew Desiderio, Tia Mitchell and Kevin Williamson. FOX “Fox News Sunday”: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) … Adam Boehler … Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). Panel: Roger Zakheim, Guy Benson, Meghan Hays and Josh Kraushaar. Sunday feature: Joel Rosenberg. 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 deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.
| | | | A message from The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: A new U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey conducted by McLaughlin and Associates says:
By a nearly 3-to-1 margin (64% to 20%), voters favor permanently extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, noting its ability to reduce and simplify the federal tax burden on families and businesses, stimulate economic growth, create jobs, and enhance the global competitiveness of American companies. Support for permanent tax relief transcends partisan lines, with 81% of Republicans, 55% of Independents, and even a majority—53%—of Democrats backing the 2017 tax law. This broad support can translate at the polls, as 65% of voters say they are more likely to support a candidate who votes to make the tax cuts permanent, compared to just 20% who would be less likely to do so.
See why voters support permanent tax relief. Learn more. | | | | | | | 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 | | | |
