| | | | |  | | By Garrett Ross | | Presented by |  | | | |  | THE CATCH-UP | | | TALLAHASSEE ON THE POTOMAC — “Trump is loading his administration up with Floridians. Is Washington ready?” our colleagues Gary Fineout, Mia McCarthy, Meridith McGraw and Kimberly Leonard discuss what Florida’s takeover of the Republican Party means in a second DONALD TRUMP administration. Notable nugget: Among the roster of officials filling out the Trump 2.0 team, the president-elect has picked more than a dozen operatives, lawyers and officials who attended his criminal trial in Manhattan earlier this year, per NYT’s Benjamin Oreskes.
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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says Mexico is ready to respond to Trump's tariffs. | Hector Vivas/Getty Images | TARIFF WARS — In response to Trump’s vow to raise a 25 percent tariff on Mexico on his first day in office, Mexican President CLAUDIA SHEINBAUM indicated today that her country is preparing to go tit-for-tat. “One tariff would be followed by another in response, and so on until we put at risk common businesses,” Sheinbaum said, referring to U.S. automakers that have plants on both sides of the border. While Sheinbaum said she would engage in talks with the U.S., she said drugs were “a problem of public health and consumption in your country’s society,” per the AP. It’s a notable response from Sheinbaum that indicates Trump’s dealings with Mexico might not be as smooth as they were in his first administration, when he had a generally amicable relationship with former President ANDRÉS MANUEL LÓPEZ OBRADOR. Meanwhile, BYD, a Chinese electric-vehicle maker, is working on plans to stand up a manufacturing plant in Mexico, putting the country in a pickle as Trump returns to office, WSJ’s Santiago Pérez and Raffaele Huang report. Officials in Mexico “fear a BYD plant would send the wrong message to Trump and the trade hawks around him by suggesting that Mexico wants to be a backdoor for Chinese companies to sell to Americans.”
|  Canadian PM Justin Trudeau says he spoke with Trump after the president-elect issued his tariff threat. | Frank Augstein/AP | As for our neighbors up north, Canadian PM JUSTIN TRUDEAU said he had a “good call” with Trump last night following Trump’s announcement that he’ll impose a 25 percent tariff on Canadian goods. “We obviously talked about laying out the facts, talking about how the intense and effective connections between our two countries flow back and forth,” Trudeau said today. Two other top Canadian officials released a statement yesterday stressing that border security is their top priority and Trudeau said he’d convene a meeting with his provincial counterparts this week to discuss the U.S. More from Mickey Djuric from Ottawa Related reads: “After Trump’s Tariff Threat, Is a China Currency War Next?” by NYT’s Keith Bradsher … “UK could strike back at Trump with taxes on Harleys and Jack Daniel’s,” by Stefan Boscia
|  Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) has some advice for his fellow Democrats. | Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO | RECRIMINATION STATION — The onslaught of postmortems from Democrats searching for answers about what happened and where the party goes from here continues, with a batch of new venting from prominent Democratic figures. Deep in the heart: Texas Democratic Rep. VICENTE GONZALEZ, who far outpaced VP KAMALA HARRIS in his southern district, has a couple strong messages for Democratic brass: “No. 1: Don’t tell him how to handle his business, he’s going to represent his district the way he knows is best. And No. 2: Clean up your own act,” The Texas Tribune’s Matthew Choi writes. “He said the party’s fixation on abortion this cycle was ‘lazy’ and out of touch with his majority-Catholic district. He urged the party to, in some cases, soften its defenses of transgender rights, even if that means voting against the Democratic base. He said Democrats had insufficiently attacked Republicans on economic issues. And he said the Democrats were plagued with ‘incompetence’ in gauging the driving issues for voters in districts like his.” “‘Their messaging is off. I also believe their polling is off. Democratic polling has been consistently off beyond the margin of error for the last two or three cycles,’ Gonzalez said in his Capitol Hill office. It’s ‘incompetence, at the end of the day. I think they need to get rid of people.’” The escape pod: The top-ranking Harris lieutenants are also popping their heads up for the first time, sitting down with “Pod Save America” for a post-election analysis, explaining how they approached the campaign and why they fell short.
- Why Harris didn’t break from Biden, per senior adviser STEPHANIE CUTTER: “It wasn't going to give us what we needed, because it wouldn’t be a clean break. … So, the best we could do and the most that she felt comfortable with was saying, like, look, vice presidents never break with their presidents.”
- On the campaign’s tepid response to Trump’s attacks ads, here’s principal deputy campaign manager QUENTIN FULKS: “If we spent this entire race pushing back on immigration attacks or crime attacks, and pushing back against trans attacks, at what point are we bringing Trump down? … We tested a ton of responses to this, direct responses. And none of them ever tested as well as basically her, you know, talking about what she would do [for] the future, the type of president that she would be.”
- Explaining Harris’ interview and media strategy, here’s campaign chair JEN O’MALLEY DILLON: “Real people heard in some way that we were not going to have interviews, which was both not true and also so counter to any kind of standard that was put on Trump that I think that was a problem. … And, you know, I think back and think we should have signaled more of our strategy early on about podcasts and who we were trying to reach. … But being up against a narrative that we weren't doing anything or we were afraid to have interviews is completely bullshit and also like took hold a little bit and we just gave us another thing we had to fight back for that Trump never had to worry about.”
- Democrats’ messaging challenges, per Fulks: “It's a party problem. Republicans don't make Trump apologize. We don't have to mimic it, but I think that there are a lot of times where if you're in the Democratic Party and you step out of line, you get punished for it. … We put out an ad with a cuss word in it and the amount of feedback that we got was insane.”
Not so fast: Hawaii Sen. BRIAN SCHATZ, though, is worried that the analysis is moving too quickly in too many directions. That’s why, since Election Day, he “been using one-on-one chats with colleagues to become the Hill’s most prominent advocate for taking a very deep breath, learning way more about what went wrong, and cooling it ASAP with the hot takes,” N.Y. Mag’s Gabriel Debenedetti writes. “In his view, the party is at risk of going down a series of unproductive paths, and of fighting unhelpful fights, if it commits to any one course before it fully understands what just happened.” Fascinating read: “Transgender Activists Question the Movement’s Confrontational Approach,” by NYT’s Jeremy Peters: “Facing diminishing public support, some activists say all-or-nothing tactics are not working. ‘We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds.’” Good Tuesday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. Drop me a line at gross@politico.com.
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Learn more. | | | | | 6 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW | | |  Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is laying the foundation for Trump's second-term agenda. | Eric Gay/AP | 1. THE QUICK TURN: “Texas pivots from feuding with Biden over the border to providing the blueprint for Trump,” by CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, Ashley Killough and Tierney Sneed: “In a spate of recent announcements, Texas said it would offer up to 1,400 acres of land for the government to use for detention centers and introduced a new unit of troopers to patrol the border on horseback. … “In a sign of the changing nature of the relationship, Trump is weighing one of [Gov. GREG] ABBOTT’s senior advisors — Texas border czar MICHAEL BANKS — to lead US Customs and Border Protection, according to multiple sources. … Trump’s team is, in part, banking on state cooperation to fulfill the president-elect’s campaign promise of mass deportation by shifting state resources to help agents along the US southern border and free up federal personnel to detain undocumented immigrants in the US, according to two sources.” 2. LIKE A DOGE CHASING ITS TAIL: “Musk Wants $2 Trillion of Spending Cuts. Here’s Why That’s Hard,” by WSJ’s Justin Lahart and Rosie Ettenheim: “The amount spent on these mandatory categories has gone up, driven by rising healthcare costs and an aging population tapping into Social Security and Medicare benefits. Mandatory spending was equal to nearly 15% of the U.S. GDP this past year, compared with about 10% two decades ago. These obligations will only continue to grow. “Other, smaller mandatory categories include items such as retirement benefits for military and federal employees, and support for states to help with foster care and adoption. Beyond those mandatory spending categories, the U.S. must also pay the interest on its massive pile of debt. Its net interest payments came to about $950 billion this past year. Combined, mandatory spending and interest payments amount to about three-quarters of what the federal government spent.”
| | | | REGISTER NOW: As the 118th Congress ends, major decisions loom, including healthcare appropriations. Key focus: site neutrality. Can aligning hospital and clinic costs cut federal spending, reflect physician costs, and lower patient expenses? Join policymakers and providers to discuss. | | | | | 3. CHIPS AND DIP: The Biden administration announced today that it would “award up to $7.86 billion in direct funding to Intel, with the U.S. chip giant set to receive at least $1 billion of that money before the end of the year,” NYT’s Ana Swanson and Tripp Mickle report. “The money is a reduction from Intel’s preliminary award of $8.5 billion, which President Biden announced during a visit to the company’s Arizona plant in March. The Commerce Department said it had reduced Intel’s grant because the chip maker, the biggest recipient of money under the CHIPS Act, also received a $3 billion contract to make semiconductors domestically for the military.” 4. FOR YOUR RADAR: “Millions from tax refunds go to pay hidden fees, report finds,” by WaPo’s Julie Zauzmer Weil: “Americans paid private tax preparers nearly $850 million in fees for special-purpose bank accounts to receive their tax refunds in the most recent tax year, according to a new government report that faulted the Internal Revenue Service for failing to warn consumers about the expense. In a report last week, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that nearly 22 million taxpayers used a tax refund product provided by their tax preparer last year — primarily temporary bank accounts created to receive the refund, but also loans that gave them early access to the money.”
| | | | Want to know what's really happening with Congress's make-or-break spending fights? Get daily insider analysis of Hill negotiations, funding deadlines, and breaking developments—free in your inbox with Inside Congress. Subscribe now. | | | | | 5. WHAT RFK JR. IS READING: “Does the United States Have an Infertility Crisis?” by NYT’s Dani Blum: “Like people in many other developed regions across the globe, Americans are having fewer children now than before — a demographic trend that has alarmed some conservatives in particular. Some of that is likely a result of social and economic factors, like steep child care costs, housing prices and more people choosing to forgo starting families. But whether infertility is becoming more common is a different question, and a difficult one to answer conclusively.” 6. THE LATEST OUT OF BRAZIL: “Dozens of recordings reveal high-ranking Brazilian officers pressured Bolsonaro to stage a coup,” by AP’s Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo: “A trove of leaked audio recordings from late 2022 reveal high-ranking members of Brazil ‘s army discussing efforts to pressure then-President JAIR BOLSONARO to carry out a coup and remain in power. The 53 recordings, obtained by the Federal Police and accessed by The Associated Press on Monday, provide a rare chance to hear military members expressing in their own voices their desire to keep leftist LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA from taking office.”
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