| | | |  | | By Adam Wren | Presented by the National Retail Federation | With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine Good Sunday morning. Adam Wren here. Drop me a line: awren@politico.com.
|  | DRIVING THE DAY | | COMING SOON TO 2026 ADS: Here’s one that you’re bound to see repeated ad nauseam in Democrats’ ads this cycle: In an interview yesterday with NBC News, President Donald Trump was asked whether American auto companies will be forced to raise prices given his new tariffs. His response? “I couldn’t care less if they raise prices, because people are going to start buying American-made cars,” per NBC’s Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez. Trump went on: “I couldn’t care less. I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. … [I]f the prices on foreign cars go up, they’re going to buy American cars.” More below on this week’s new wave of tariffs …
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Former President Joe Biden's extended orbit is bracing for a steady march of no fewer than four books dropping over the next several weeks. | Ben Curtis/AP | THE BIDEN BOOK DELUGE: The race to shape Joe Biden’s legacy is on. The former president’s extended orbit is bracing for a steady march of no fewer than four books dropping over the next few months that promise to excavate and relitigate not only the historic 2024 presidential campaign but the former president’s own physical and mental condition before dropping out. Biden allies are already prebutting some of those books’ authors, challenging their framing and questioning their fact-checking approach in an attempt to protect the former president’s image. Dozens of former and current Biden aides have engaged on the books, according to a person with visibility into the process. Biden allies seem to be defining a satisfactory fact-checking process as one that includes readouts of dates, people, memos and meetings mentioned and a chance for Biden world to respond, item by item. Kelly Scully, Biden’s spokesperson, declined to comment on the record on how Biden allies engaged in the book process. Biden’s aides did not make him available to any of those books’ authors, Playbook has learned. According to a person close to the former president, he’s reserving the space to tell his story in his own book. That prospective work, whose existence was first reported by NBC, does not yet have a release date and could publish as early as 2026, this person said. Starting Tuesday, the crush of books will begin with Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House” ($32). Already, the duo have produced reporting that depicts Biden’s decline in vivid detail, including that he forgot the identity of one of his 2020 rivals and that Democratic officials had “hush-hush talks” to game out Biden’s withdrawal as early as 2023, according to an excerpt in The Guardian. Following “Fight,” Chris Whipple will deliver “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” ($32) on April 8. “I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story,” Whipple told Playbook Sunday morning. “I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.” Whipple said his book will delve into the pre-debate prep session at Camp David, Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) maneuvering to get Biden to step down and George Clooney’s reaction to being accused of “being in cahoots” with former President Barack Obama to drive Biden from the race. On May 20 comes the book Biden allies fear the most: “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” ($32), by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Biden aides who participated in the reporting of that book, according to the person familiar, were shocked to read the “cover-up” framing on the book jacket, as such framing wasn’t used explicitly in some of the interviews facilitated by Biden handers, this person claimed. They say while Thompson and Tapper openly grappled with Biden’s age prior to the book’s release, allegations of a cover-up or conspiracy broke new ground. Asked about this, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson told Playbook: “Starting after Election Day, Jake and Alex began working on ‘Original Sin' and found people post-election much more willing to talk candidly than they had been. Jake and Alex interviewed more than 200 people to figure out just what went behind the scenes of the Biden White House, conducting an extensive reporting and fact-checking process, including with former President Biden's team. We’re not going to discuss who participated but stay tuned for what they discovered.” “Only one book, to my knowledge, involved the Biden and [Kamala] Harris teams in a fact-checking process,” someone close to Biden and familiar with the book process and incoming requests told Playbook. That book is Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf’s "2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America” ($32), which is due out on July 8. In contrast to Biden, Trump was interviewed by the authors of that book. “We did more than 350 interviews for the book covering all three campaigns,” Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf said in a statement. “We spent more than a month fact-checking the manuscript, giving every person named the opportunity to respond for fairness and accuracy.” Book authors often hire their own fact-checkers, and often know what's checkable with the principals and what they can get confirmed elsewhere. (It’s worth noting Tapper and Thompson and Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf share the same publisher, Penguin Random House.) The person close to Biden added that “no manuscripts were sent and there was zero expectation for manuscripts to be sent, but basic fact-checking is part of any editorial process to ensure mistakes are avoided such as wrong date for Congressional picnic at White House now printed in ‘Fight.’” (“We stand by our reporting,” Parnes told Playbook, who along with Allen, has produced two other well-regarded books about previous presidential campaigns.) Some former Biden aides don’t expect the books to make much of a splash. They’re betting amid the tumult of Trump’s second term, Biden’s legacy could look better. “Our attitude is the focus is on ‘How can you help?’ and most of his alumni are,” a former Biden adviser told Playbook. “There will be [book] parties in D.C., but we’re also going to move onto the next Signalgate in 30 seconds.” Still, that may be wishful thinking from Biden world. “The next six weeks will be rough for the entire Biden family, because they’re going to be the primary focus (and likely villains) in all of these books,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic campaign veteran who worked for Biden Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. “The question for them is whether they continue trying to fight old battles and draw more attention to these books, or if they focus on correcting inaccuracies and hoping the rest of it dies down quickly.”
| | | | A message from the National Retail Federation: NRF supports plans by the administration and Congress to expand the American economy through tax reform, deregulation and new sources of affordable energy. But trade policy issues are creating uncertainty and causing consumers to hold back on spending. High tariffs on imported goods will raise the price of products and slow economic growth. We need trade policies that protect American families, workers and small businesses. Tariffs should always be strategic and a tool of last resort. Learn more. | | | | FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: A new grassroots organization backing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and promoting “America First policies that strengthen national security and support our veterans” launched today. Veteran Action will be helmed by Mark Lucas, a former member of the Article III project who was instrumental in Hegseth’s confirmation. Lucas tells Playbook he modelled the Veteran Action Center after the hard-nosed A3P Action Center that he built for Mike Davis, which generated tens of thousands of grassroots contacts from conservative constituents to GOP senators. Davis said Lucas is adopting the brass-knuckles approach of his own organization, which he has said gave Republican senators “an attitude adjustment.” For Hegseth, the organization couldn’t come at a better time, as he is under increasing pressure for his involvement in Signalgate and other controversies. “Veteran Action has Pete’s back 100 percent,” Lucas told Playbook. “And we are urging members of Congress to have his back and not fall for this fake scandal.” Lucas has already drafted action alerts on everything from tariff policies to DOGE and eliminating Pentagon waste to confirming Elbridge Colby as under secretary of Defense. “We are warning members of Congress that they better have Pete Hegseth’s back, because we are watching closely their actions and we’re going to be around for the 2026 midterms and Veteran Action is going to help set the policy conversation for the 2028 presidential campaign,” Lucas said.
| | | | A message from the National Retail Federation:  
Trade policy impacts businesses and consumers. Register to learn more. | | | | SUNDAY BEST … — Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on whether the Signalgate chat contained classified information, on ABC’s “This Week”: “There is no question, regardless of agency, that this was classified. … Hegseth, and those folks who are obfuscating and giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think they're lying about [it]; they should know this is classified.” — Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on the inspector general possibly investigating Signalgate, on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “It's entirely appropriate for the inspector general to be able to look at it and to be able to ask two questions. … One is, how did a reporter get in this conversation? And the second one is, how do members of the administration talk to each other when they're on the road on things that are clearly timely?” — Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) on the Signal chat, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “What this conversation should be is why didn't the Biden administration do something the last two years [in Yemen] … The [Signal] conversation was a thoughtful conversation and the attack was extremely successful.” — Wisconsin Supreme Court Candidate Brad Schimel on outside money in the race, on “FOX News Sunday”: “I don't control any of the spending from any outside group, whether it's Elon Musk or anyone else that has an organization spending money in this race. I’ve run a 72-county race in Wisconsin. I’ve campaigned in every county for 16 months. I’m not running for anything for Elon Musk or any other person.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
| | | | A message from the National Retail Federation:  
Trade policy impacts businesses and consumers. Register to learn more. | | | | 9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR
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President Donald Trump is set to unveil a major wave of new tariffs on U.S. trading partners on Wednesday. | Alex Wong/Getty Images | 1. TARIFF TROUBLES: On Wednesday, Trump is set to unveil a major wave of new tariffs on U.S. trading partners. That same day, another tranche of tariffs on consumer goods is set to take effect — what the president has billed as “Liberation Day.” But across the U.S., there are signs that far from being liberated, many businesses are starting to feel shackled to a new reality that has many worried about the direction of the economy and its likely impact on everyday Americans. Tightening the screws: “Rising costs for screws are rippling through manufacturing supply chains” on account of Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, report WSJ’s Bob Tita and Ryan Felton. That’s likely to affect everything from cars to construction. Without a cost slowdown or lower interest rates, “real-estate developers are likely to start delaying construction projects or canceling them later in the year,” according to industry experts. In the auto industry: “Everything is dead in the water until the rules are more clearly understood,” one leading U.S. automotive supplier tells the Detroit Free Press’ Jamie LaReau. New 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles and many auto parts will kick in on Thursday — which industry experts fear will “blow up what is a complex supply chain and tack on billions of dollars in costs as companies pay tariffs on parts that cross borders, often several times, before reaching final assembly on a vehicle made in the United States.” Existing in the context: “President Trump’s tariffs threaten to amplify a big inflation challenge: Even before the new levies landed, a long run of everyday stuff getting cheaper was coming to a close,” writes WSJ’s Matt Grossman. Trade was a big part of the reason why prices stayed so low for so long — but that era is coming to a close, both because of Trump’s tariffs and the reality that “there’s no second China waiting to be unleashed on the global economy,” as one economist put it. What’s to come: The Richmond Fed, Atlanta Fed and Duke University released a study this week “that found that companies that don’t import from Canada, Mexico and China expect to raise prices 2.9% this year,” writes Grossman. “But companies that rely heavily on these tariffed countries plan to raise prices 5.1%.” More tariff reads: “Trump’s threat of towering tariffs on European booze is sobering,” by WaPo’s William Booth … “On Minnesota’s Iron Range, Trump’s Tariffs Could Be Boom or Bust,” by NYT’s Charles Homans … “Trump’s Trade War Arrives in America’s Heartland,” by WSJ’s Joe Barrett 2. RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: As Trump ramps up pressure on GOP leaders to pass key parts of his legislative agenda, Republicans are on track to adopt an unconventional budget deal that would set different budget numbers for both the House and Senate chambers. “The split screen could be stark, at least on paper,”POLITICO’s Jennifer Scholtes and Jordain Carney report in a look at the wonky approach. “House committees will be asked to cut at least $2 trillion in spending from safety-net programs, while Senate committees might be directed to find a minimum of a few billion dollars in savings.” Though the path is considered Republicans’ only real option to expedite a budget deal, it risks complicating negotiations on a final package: “The unspoken assumption of many conservatives is that once a budget with bare-bones Senate instructions is approved, leaders will ultimately settle on a less ambitious package of cuts,” and rely on Trump to get it passed. “Under pressure to deliver a final product, the House would simply waive its more ambitious budget targets in the rule bringing a final bill to the floor.” 3. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: Yesterday, Hamas leaders accepted a proposal for a new ceasefire deal that would allow aid to flow to Gaza and hasten the release of more hostages. But Israel made a counter-proposal in “full coordination” with the U.S., AP’s Samy Magdy and Julia Frankel Report from Cairo. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said today that hostage negotiations continue. Hamas has “ruled out laying down its arms as Israel has demanded,” Reuters’ James Mackenzie and Nidal Al-Mughrabi report from Jerusalem. 4. NOT A HAPPY CAMPER: “Trump says he’s ‘very angry’ and ‘pissed off’ at Putin during an NBC News interview,” by NBC News’ Kristen Welker and Megan Lebowitz. Trump said that if he believes the lack of progress on a Ukraine ceasefire is “Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” the president told NBC News. Write Welker and Lebowitz: “Trump said Putin knows he is angry, but noted that he has ‘a very good relationship with him’ and ‘the anger dissipates quickly ... if he does the right thing.’” 5. ON WISCONSIN: In a last-ditch effort, Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul urged the state’s Supreme Court this morning to do what two lower courts wouldn’t: Stop Elon Musk from giving away two $1 million checks to voters just hours before Musk is set to appear in Green Bay tonight, AP’s Scott Bauer reports. Kaul has repeatedly argued the checks are an attempt to illegally incentivize votes, coming just ahead of the state’s pivotal Supreme Court election on Tuesday. 6. GOING NUCLEAR: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian announced today that the country has rejected direct negotiations with the U.S. over its nuclear powers, AP’s Jon Gambrell and Amir Vahdat report. Trump sought to restart nuclear negotiations in a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei earlier this month. Though indirect negotiations with Iran may still be on the table, “talks have made no progress since Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew America from Tehran’s nuclear deal.” 7. KASH-STRAPPED: Trump appointed FBI chief Kash Patel to head up the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but Patel has been largely absent from that role since being handed the job, and “there appears to be scant communication between the acting director and the people who work for the 5,000-person agency,” WaPo’s Perry Stein and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez report. That has heightened the “uncertainty hovering over ATF, a relatively small law enforcement entity that has bubbled into a political juggernaut, touted by Democrats as critical to combating gun violence and accused by Republicans of trying to overregulate firearms.” 8. IN THE WILDERNESS: “This progressive leader has a strategy for Dems: Drop the purity tests, and ‘pick villains’ in the GOP,” by POLITICO’s Elena Schneider: “[Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas)] is meeting privately with other members to discuss ways to steer the party toward a more populist economic message … and he’s mounting an aggressive public relations campaign to push it. … In his interview with POLITICO, Casar argued that Democrats haven’t been willing to be confrontational enough — especially compared to President Donald Trump.” 9. IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREENLAND: Danish PM Mette Frederiksen announced she will head to Greenland this week to “strengthen the bond” between both countries, just days after VP JD Vance made his own trip to the nation, POLITICO’s Ali Bianco reports. Though Vance faced a frosty reception during his visit, Frederiksen has been invited by the government to meet with Greenland’s governing coalition leader Jens-Frederik Nielsen and residents of the country. The trip comes amid an ongoing pressure campaign from Trump to bring Greenland under U.S. influence, which has stoked unease among European leaders.
| | TALK OF THE TOWN | | The White House Correspondents’ Association canceled the planned headlining performance by comedian Amber Ruffin at next month’s correspondents’ dinner amid ongoing tensions between the White House press corps and the Trump administration. Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, Marco Rubio and so on: Ties with a wide Windsor knot — sized “somewhere between meatballs and dinner rolls” — have become the unofficial look of Donald Trump’s Washington, per NYT’s Jacob Gallagher. A United Airlines flight landing at Reagan National Airport ran into a kite being flown by a parkgoer at Gravelly Point on Saturday afternoon, per WUSA. The kite was later confiscated by police. HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) … Rick Hart … Kevin Dowling of 3M … Tracey Lintott … WaPo’s John Hudson … Mark Pfeifle … Joe Kildea of the Club for Growth … Suzy Khimm … Morning Consult’s Michael Ramlet … Bradleigh Chance … Alex Kingsbury … Scott Rasmussen … Casey Higgins of Akin Gump … CBS’ Richard Escobedo … Jason Greenblatt … Drew Maloney of the American Investment Council … Invariant’s Susan Lagana … Jeremy Kenney of Campaign Solutions … Jamiyl Peters … AT&T’s Marc Gonzales … Peter La Fountain … Visa’s Jeremy Sturchio … Mark Strand … David Greer of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities … Matt Laslo … HuffPost’s Jessica Schulberg … former Sens. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Bob Smith (R-N.H.) … former Reps. Patrick Murphy (D-Fla.) and Janice Hahn (D-Calif.) … Maxim Healthcare Services’ Veronica Charles … Mark Vandroff … Lesly Weber McNitt … Robert Blancato … Samantha Fernandez of Trident GMG Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send 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 National Retail Federation: The administration's trade policy announcements are creating high levels of uncertainty and are affecting consumer confidence and the affordability of everyday goods. The White House is expected to announce new reciprocal tariffs on our nation's trading partners that will impact retail business operations, employees and consumers. Retailers source domestically whenever possible, but most rely on a mix of domestic and imported products and manufacturing components so they can offer customers a variety of items at affordable prices. Small businesses buy and sell imported products to meet the demands of their customers, and higher prices on imported goods will unfairly burden American families, workers and Main Street businesses. We need pro-growth trade policies that support businesses and consumers. 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 | | | |
