| | | |  | | By Zack Stanton | | Presented by |  | | | With help from Eli Okun, Bethany Irvine and Ali Bianco Good Sunday morning! I’m Zack Stanton. Get in touch.
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President Donald Trump has made huge cuts to scientific research. | Mark Schiefelbein, File/AP | BACK TO SCHOOL: With fall semesters beginning — and no single story dominating the news — this morning, we bring you a special back-to-school edition of Playbook. MATH: Middle-class Americans are increasingly feeling squeezed by their daily dollars-and-cents reality: The cost of living adds up to simply too much, as WSJ’s Katherine Hamilton and Alison Sider write with some sweep this morning. Consumer sentiment has dropped, pessimism about the job market is increasing and middle-class customers are cutting back. In short: The economic vibe has shifted. Growing apart: “The gap in confidence between high- and low-earners is now the widest it has been in the seven years of tracking the [Morning Consult] data,” per WSJ. “More U.S. consumers now say they’re dialing down spending than when inflation spiked in 2022.” SCIENCE: President Donald Trump has “laid off large teams of scientists, pulled the plug on thousands of research projects and proposed deep spending cuts for new studies,” reports NYT’s William Broad. “If his proposed $44 billion cut to next year’s budget is enacted, it will prompt the largest drop in federal support for science since World War II, when scientists and Washington began their partnership.” The bigger picture: Trump’s “assault on researchers and their institutions is so deep that historians and other experts see similarities to the playbook employed by autocratic regimes to curb science.” Food for thought: “[D]espots over the ages devised a lopsided way of funding science that punished blue-sky thinkers and promoted gadget makers,” NYT writes. “Trump’s science policies, experts say, follow that approach. He hails Silicon Valley’s wizards of tech but undermines the basic research that thrives on free thought and sows the seeds of not only Nobel Prizes but trillion-dollar industries.” SOCIAL STUDIES: Trump has said that he wants to do away with mail-in voting and suggested that he would try to act unilaterally to abolish it ahead of the midterms via an executive order. But many Republicans are lukewarm to the idea, even as they harbor doubts about the sanctity of votes by mail, as NBC’s Matt Dixon and Henry Gomez write. Kill off the canard: While Trump has baselessly suggested that Democrats cheat and win by using mail-in ballots, the numbers from 2024 point to a different reality. “Voter turnout by mail exceeded 30% in at least 14 states and the District of Columbia, according to the most recent data available. Trump won half of those states, most of which have Republican governors or secretaries of state overseeing elections,” NBC notes. “Others, like Arizona and Michigan, have Democrats overseeing elections but are major electoral battlegrounds.” There’s also a constitutional reality to contend with: If Trump “were to sign an executive order banning mail-in voting, plenty of political and legal issues would remain. The Constitution gives the right to each state to determine the ‘times, places, and manner’ of House and Senate elections.” Which raises a question: Could the White House make this its next twist-the-screws project, pressuring red states to implement more restrictions on vote by mail? LANGUAGE ARTS: What’s in a label? If you’re running for office, quite a lot, depending on what’s being said and your locale. During her quest for the Virginia governorship, Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger has emphasized her moderate bona fides. A few hundred miles north, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s nomination for mayor of New York City “has seeded a narrative that the party’s left wing is on the march — a narrative that Republicans have eagerly embraced to paint Democrats as radical,” WSJ’s Molly Ball writes. Spanberger’s goal: Be the anti-Mamdani. How to do that: Communication. “Spanberger has focused her gubernatorial campaign on pocketbook issues, rolling out detailed plans to reduce the costs of energy, housing and healthcare while largely avoiding hot-button issues,” WSJ writes. “In interviews, she didn’t stake out clear positions on how schools should handle transgender children, which has become a major campaign issue, or to what extent the state should cooperate with federal immigration raids.” What the moderates are hoping for: “The message that will come out of the Spanberger win is that the noise and the fireworks might be in the bluest cities, but the road map to regaining power nationally runs through Virginia,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the center-left think tank Third Way.
| | | | A message from Booz Allen: Booz Allen uses the most advanced tech to engineer, build, and deploy what nobody else can. So our nation can stay ahead. It's how we win every time, everywhere. It's in our code. Learn more. | | | | FOREIGN LANGUAGE: “Serenida y pacencia. Serenity and patience.” Those are the words, uttered by a fictional Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in a political cartoon, that POLITICO’s Nahal Toosi thinks of whenever she hears people praise Sheinbaum’s handling of Trump — which is often. But there’s a more nuanced reality: “Sheinbaum is not winning this showdown with the U.S. president,” Nahal writes. “She’s simply not losing. Her ‘success’ is that she’s limited or deferred the damage Trump could cause to her country, not prevented it.” Sheinbaum’s strategy: “When I look at the global landscape … one trend that emerges is that many heads of state are trying to buy time, hoping that if they can survive Trump, his successor will have policies more favorable to them,” Nahal writes. “Running out the clock appears to be a major part of Sheinbaum’s playbook, according to my conversations with people who know her.” Related reading: “Mexico’s President Struggles to Escape Trump’s Growing Demands,” by NYT’s Jack Nicas PHYSICAL EDUCATION: “President Donald Trump has celebrated next year’s World Cup as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to show off the United States,” POLITICO’s Sophia Cai writes. “But in many host cities, that honor is tempered by a growing concern over shouldering millions of dollars in security and logistical costs.” The price tag: “While Congress has approved $625 million in security funding nationwide, local governments still have to find the money to cover other expenses that could run up to $150 million per city.” Who’s left to pick up the tab? Local governments. Now, some host cities are cutting back on their World Cup dreams as the White House’s World Cup Task Force has sent a clear message: “The federal government would help with security needs, but nothing more,” as Sophia writes. WESTERN CIV.: “For the first time, populist or far-right parties are leading the polls in the U.K., France and Germany, the latest sign of growing voter discontent in much of the continent following years of high immigration and inflation,” WSJ’s David Luhnow and colleagues write. “That could provoke a period of political turbulence in all three countries, even if national elections are likely still a few years away.” Sound familiar? “Like the U.S., much of Europe has experienced two things at the same time since the pandemic: record levels of immigration that have caused a voter backlash, and a surge in inflation that has now eased but left prices for many goods much higher than before — leaving many voters feeling worse off. Social media has also polarized opinions.” SUNDAY BEST … — Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) on his push with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) for the Jeffrey Epstein files, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “What will be explosive is the Sept. 3 press conference that both of us are having with 10 Epstein victims, many who have never spoken out before. They’re going to be on the steps of the Capitol. They will be telling their story, and they will be saying clearly to the American public that they want the release of the Epstein files for full closure on this matter.” — Demetre Daskalakis on the CDC upheaval and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine moves, on ABC’s “This Week”: “From my vantage point as a doctor who’s taken the Hippocratic oath, I only see harm coming. I may be wrong. But based on what I’m seeing … they do want to see the undoing of mRNA vaccination. They have a very specific target on Covid. But I do fear that they have other things that they are going to be working on [like the Hepatitis B vaccine] … The firewall between science and ideology is completely broken down.” — DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on the federal crackdown on big cities, on CBS’ “Face the Nation”: “I won’t speak to the specifics of the operations that are planned in other cities, but I do know that L.A. wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action. Then that city would have burned down, if left to the devices of the mayor and the governor … Bringing those federal law enforcement officers in was incredibly important to keeping peace.” — Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on who pays for tariffs, on “Meet the Press”: “No question that tariffs are a tax. The question is, who actually pays that? Part of it’s going to be paid by the importer. Part of it’s going to be paid by the exporter … But what we’re seeing right now is inflation is still stable at this point.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
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| | | | 9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR 1. CHICAGO JUSTICE: Expecting a major, LA-style federal immigration crackdown in the coming days or weeks, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson yesterday signed an executive order putting up a sharp defense against it, as CNN’s Whitney Wild and Piper Hudspeth Blackburn scooped. Johnson urged Trump not to follow through with the plans to target Chicago, saying it was unwanted and that local police wouldn’t collaborate with federal agents on arrests and immigration enforcement. The order also urged federal agents not to wear masks to conceal their identities. The White House dismissed it as a “publicity stunt.” The view from D.C.: Trump’s federal surge in D.C. has been credited with a drop in violent crime in recent weeks. But it didn’t stop a sudden spike in robberies this weekend, WaPo’s Martin Weil reports. The Park Police have launched 10 car chases in the past few weeks, which local police ordinarily wouldn’t do, leading to six crashes, WaPo’s Emma Uber reports. And experts tell NYT’s Tim Arango that the positive change from the law enforcement surge likely won’t last. Longer-term solutions that could work, they say, range from ideas Trump has floated — like beautification of public spaces to improve lighting — to efforts for which he has cut funding, like the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services office. The politics: Democrats are struggling with how to respond to Trump because even many of their own voters consider crime a major issue in big cities, though they may not approve of the president’s actions, AP’s Jill Colvin and Linley Sanders report. 2. BATTLE FOR THE BALLOT: Trump announced last night that he’s planning an executive order to mandate voter ID across every election — along with his already-stated opposition to mail-in voting and voting machines. It’s not clear whether he’d have the authority to do that, since states are given the constitutional power to oversee elections and Congress can override them. But it comes amid Trump’s ongoing campaign of false claims about election fraud, which have become gospel across much of the GOP, and amid Republicans’ gerrymandering-fueled, “wide-ranging effort to gain any advance they can ahead of midterm elections,” NYT’s Yan Zhuang notes. 3. BREAKING: “Judge blocks abrupt deportation of hundreds of Guatemalan children,” by POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein: “A federal judge has ordered an emergency halt to an apparent plan by the Trump administration to deport more than 600 unaccompanied Guatemalan children to their home country — some within a matter of hours — after immigrant advocacy groups sued, calling the unannounced plan illegal. … The judge, a Biden appointee, also scheduled a virtual hearing on the matter for 3 p.m. Sunday.” More immigration reading: “DOJ reassigned top attorneys. They quit after feeling sidelined,” by WaPo’s Perry Stein: “About a dozen lawyers from high-profile sections including the civil rights and national security divisions agreed to the transfer [to a sanctuary cities enforcement working group] … Six months later, all of those attorneys have left DOJ … [T]hey got the impression that the task force was designed to do nothing but frustrate and eventually force out lawyers the administration felt it could replace with [loyalists] … [M]embers were asked to do Google-type searches and other menial research on those policies — and were told there was no need to communicate with the lawyers who were actually filing high-profile lawsuits.” 4. TRADING PLACES: Friday’s appellate court ruling finding that many of Trump’s tariffs were illegal has injected yet another round of uncertainty into global markets, Bloomberg’s Erik Larson and Laura Curtis report. With the levies still in place for now, it remains unclear how broadly an injunction will apply or where the Supreme Court will land, if an appeal ends up before the justices. Trillions of dollars are at stake. What the world is watching: Foreign trading partners still hammering out the details of trade deals with the U.S. may be incentivized to move more slowly now. And though Trump could still win in the end, the latest ruling “may effectively neuter Trump’s ability to leverage access to the U.S. market to bring friends and foes alike to heel,” WaPo’s Jacob Bogage and Emily Davies report. 5. SPY GAMES: “Tensions rise between Gabbard and CIA chief after her disclosure of undercover officer’s name, insiders say,” by NBC’s Dan De Luce and Andrea Mitchell: “Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard blindsided CIA leaders last week when she disclosed the name of an undercover CIA officer on a list of people she stripped of security clearances … The move alarmed the agency’s workforce … and is the latest example of simmering tensions and crossed signals between Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. … After the [Alaska] summit, the CIA informed the analyst that she had lost her security clearance, effectively ending her career.” 6. STAT OF THE DAY: How much will Republicans’ unprecedented power grab of mid-decade gerrymandering tilt the playing field in their advantage? NYT’s Nate Cohn crunched the numbers to estimate what’s likely to happen if several more GOP states redistrict and California Democrats fail to counterpunch: Dems would need to win the national popular vote by 3.4 points to flip the House, compared to just 0.2 points if no states had redistricted. That’s not insurmountable — Democrats are ahead by more than that in generic-ballot surveys currently — but it is a meaningful change that would alter the outcome in a close year. 7. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: “Gaza postwar plan envisions ‘voluntary’ relocation of entire population,” by WaPo’s Karen DeYoung and Cate Brown: “A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within the Trump administration … would turn it into a trusteeship administered by the United States for at least 10 years while it is transformed into a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub. … Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new ‘AI-powered, smart cities’ to be built in Gaza.” 8. WHAT’S IN A NAME: The White House and Pentagon are serious about switching the Department of Defense to the Department of War, with or without Congress. The administration is working on plans to effectuate the change, WSJ’s Annie Linskey reports, in an effort to project a more aggressive, war-fighting image. Congress could rename it, but that’s not the only option under consideration. 9. TALES FROM THE CRYPTO: “The Trumps’ New Crypto Money Maker: Deals With Themselves,” by WSJ’s Angus Berwick and Vicky Ge Huang: “At the center of those crypto riches is World Liberty Financial, the Trump-family vehicle launched last year. In a move earlier this month, World Liberty took over a pain–treatment-turned-payments firm, which then bought World Liberty’s recently created cryptocurrency … Such deals often involve potential conflicts of interest and would have in the past drawn scrutiny from authorities … As long as the companies disclose all relevant insider information for investors to judge the risks themselves, however, the deal likely complies with U.S. securities laws.”
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| | | | | | TALK OF THE TOWN | | Joseph Kahn’s Greenwich Village apartment building was vandalized with red paint and an angry message over NYT coverage: “Joe Kahn Lies Gaza Dies.” David Axelrod, Mike Murphy and John Heilemann’s podcast, “Hacks on Tap,” has struck a licensing deal with Vox Media that begins tomorrow. IN MEMORIAM — “Mark Knoller, longtime CBS News correspondent, dies at 73,” by CBS’ Chip Reid: “Knoller was, to put it simply, a legend. For decades, everyone in the White House press corps knew him as the unofficial presidential historian and statistician. His frustration over the lack of a central database of daily presidential actions inspired him to take upon himself the enormous burden of keeping meticulous records of every presidential act, movement, and utterance, single-handedly filling an immense void in American history.” PLAYBOOK DESIGN SECTION — Trump used his Truth Social account yesterday to post a video and accuse a subcontractor of damaging limestone in the Rose Garden redesign: “We caught them, cold.” PLAYBOOK METRO SECTION — “D.C. flag sales soar amid Trump’s federal crackdown on the city,” by WaPo’s Joe Heim: “A half-dozen hardware stores in the District told The Washington Post that they were either out of D.C. flags or have struggled to keep them in stock.” WHITE HOUSE ARRIVAL LOUNGE — Kiran Menon is now director of advance for VP JD Vance. He previously was deputy chief of staff for Rep. Brian Jack (R-Ga.). TRANSITIONS — Stuart Holliday will be SVP and chief public affairs officer at Lockheed Martin. He currently is CEO of Meridian International Center. … Brianna Johnson is now head of comms at Inclusive Abundance. She previously was media director for Ben Wikler’s DNC chair campaign, and is a Harris campaign and Laura Kelly alum. WEDDING — Jordan Barkin and Ivan Jomolka, via NYT: “Mr. Jomolka … is an actor and model … Mr. Barkin … works as a freelance columnist and covers politics and popular culture. … On Aug. 13, the couple married in the living room of their Estero, Fla., home.” WELCOME TO THE WORLD — Cody Carbone, CEO of the Digital Chamber, and Molly Carbone, senior sales enablement manager at Rippling, on Thursday welcomed Josephine Quinn Carbone, who came in at 7 lbs, 7 oz and 21 inches. — Kerry Lynch, senior comms director at the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association, and Paddy Lehane, an attorney at the National Labor Relations Board, welcomed Lucy Lehane on Aug. 8. Pic BIRTHWEEK (was yesterday): Maxwell Huntley of Brownstein HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Reps. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) and Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) … Tommy Vietor of Crooked Media … Ryan Ellis … Brian Johnson of Veterans Guardian … Scott Shalett … Lauren Fine … NYT’s Tom Kaplan and Patrick Healy … Kim Hefling … Ed Goeas … Mattie Duppler of Amazon … Alex Schriver … POLITICO’s Paul Demko and Daniel Barnes … Justin Myers of Blue Leadership Collaborative … Leland Vittert and Elena Isella of NewsNation … States Newsroom’s Jennifer Shutt … CNN’s Josh Campbell … Kaylin Minton … Bennett Resnik … Andy Richards of the AFL-CIO … Nicole Watkins of New Heights Communications … Danielle Lindsay of the American Conservation Coalition … Andy Morimoto Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us on Signal here. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Zack Stanton, deputy Garrett Ross and Playbook Podcast producer Callan Tansill-Suddath. Corrections: Yesterday’s Playbook contained outdated Sunday show listings. Due to incorrect information provided to Playbook, it also misstated the MSNBC show on which Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will appear. It is “PoliticsNation.”
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