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By Ali Bianco |
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With help from Eli Okun and Irie Sentner Good Sunday afternoon. This is Ali Bianco, in the driver’s seat today with your Sunday read. Shoutout to all the New York Knicks fans — two down, two to go. Get in touch.
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DRIVING THE DAY |
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A flurry of influencers and young women flocked to San Antonio this weekend for Turning Point USA's Women's Leadership Summit. | Vitaly Manzuk/Turning Point USA |
There’s an overlooked niche in the historic coalition Republicans must defend in November that could prove pivotal to the party’s future: young conservative women. And some, like Christian conservative influencer Savanna Faith Stone, say “promises that were made have not been delivered on at all.” Now just months out from the midterms — with the young female right taking center stage at Turning Point USA’s Women’s Leadership Summit this weekend — some of the movement’s biggest female voices say they’re “not really identifying with the MAGA party anymore,” Stone told Playbook. “I think young women are realizing that. They're realizing, ‘Hey, you promised lower gas prices, you promised the economy would be better, like that's why we voted for you,’” she said. Stone, who turns 21 this week, is one of a flurry of influencers who flocked to San Antonio this weekend for the summit, where bubbling just under the surface are divisions within the GOP that have enveloped the online voices of the young right. The growing disillusionment is part of a bigger ideological divide gripping the party over being “MAGA” versus being “America First.” Trump is “not America first,” Stone said. She voted for a president who promised no new wars, who was pro-family and would bring down costs – and he hasn’t delivered, she said. “It's harder than ever for a young couple to be able to buy a home,” she added. Several young women in the grassroots expressed concerns about the administration not going conservative enough, or focusing on the wrong things. “I cannot express to you the level of alarm bells that should be ringing for the GOP,” as women consider not voting, conservative influencer Alex Clark told Playbook. Young women are looking at everything from the ongoing war in Iran to the persistence of pesticides and it’s breaking their trust, Clark argued. Clark, a 33 year-old podcaster with half a million followers who grew under the tutelage of the late Charlie Kirk, built a MAHA-focused health and wellness platform that she calls an “unaggressive way to share conservative ideals” with a loyal following. MAHA moms make up a key part of the GOP’s gains with women, and many like Clark say the administration hasn’t made good on MAHA issues either. She hasn’t shied away from criticizing the administration. “I straight up told [the White House], ‘People want ‘fight, fight, fight Trump.’ They don't want ‘ballroom Trump,’” Clark said. Along with other voices like Isabel Brown or Riley Gaines, they’ve become emblems of the Turning Point faction of Gen-Z and millennials. They believe women’s biology will push them to follow strong men. Stone drew controversy for saying voting should be one vote per household. Clark told Playbook she doesn’t think a woman should be president.
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But the universe of female influencers is vast, and often at odds. Raquel DeBono, the self-proclaimed NYC conservative of “Make America Hot Again” fame, told Playbook she “would not be caught dead” at the summit, and rejects the rigid online faction that cast out figures like Megyn Kelly. “If you want to let women into the tent and you want more women to vote conservative, you need to be less cringe and horrible,” DeBono said. And then there’s Emily Wilson, of “Emily Saves America,” and Priya Patel, conservatives living in West Hollywood who both embrace traditional values but often find an audience in women who don’t. “I read my Bible, I want to get married young, I'm saving myself for marriage,” Patel said. But the pair who co-host “Pretty Political” have followers that are "girls that do Only Fans, makeup artists, graffiti artists” who all “love America,” Wilson said. But all agree on key issues around foreign policy or accountability on the Jeffrey Epstein files that they say are diverting them from MAGA or the White House. And with young voters already a turnout problem in midterm years, they’re all concerned many young conservative women simply won’t show up come November. The administration “achieved win after win on issues women care about most — and we’re just getting started,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. “The MAGA coalition is stronger than ever, and women continue to play a powerful role in the movement.” But GOP women politicians know it’s “100,000 percent” a problem. “It's something that I have spoken to the White House about, ” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) — who co-chairs the Republican Women’s Caucus — told Playbook. She added the GOP has to be “laser focused” on delivering on affordability, “and if we don't, we're failing at earning their trust and support in the election.” And the Republican Party made the mistake before of not messaging directly to women, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Playbook. “Women want a lot of those same things. We want safe neighborhoods. We want the opportunity to make decisions about how we raise our families,” she said. There’s skepticism about whether the GOP will take these concerns seriously, Marjorie Taylor Greene texted Playbook. “I think about all the single mothers and women out there trying to make it, and it is extremely difficult, with inflation continuing to rise and overall cost of living continuing to rise.” She called Trump’s tone and language “a major turn off to women.” These women don’t regret their vote, and many expressed their desire for the administration to succeed. But any future for the growth of the budding female right has a bridge of trust to re-build. “After Trump in 2028, if we want to see this energy continue that we had in 2015 and 2024, if we want that to have any sort of life after 2028 — it has to become an America First movement,” Clark told Playbook.
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SUNDAY BEST … — President Donald Trump on the DOJ’s “Anti Weaponization Fund” — which they’ve declared dead — in an interview with NBC on “Meet the Press”: “If it was up to me, I'd pay them the kind of money that they deserve. People have been destroyed. Lives have been destroyed. … I think the weaponization fund is a great idea, and so do many other Republicans. You have to get it approved. If they get it approved, that's great. If they don't get it approved, I'd be disappointed.” On his campaign promise for no new wars: “First of all, I didn't guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world? I built our military. … We had a choice. We could let them have a nuclear weapon, or we could go along and have some beautiful days. But they would have, you know, it's a judgment. They would've used a nuclear weapon. … I just won a big election. And the reason I won an election is people have confidence in me. I have good judgment. I had to make a judgment. …. We're there for a few months. And the threat is largely over. Soon, it will be over.” More from NBC — Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on the looming expiration date for FISA, and Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte to be the acting director leading national intelligence, on ABC’s “This Week”: “I know how important this tool is. Why the president would throw this live hand grenade of Bill Pulte in 10 days before this is due to expire, I'm not sure Donald Trump wants this to expire. … The idea that you're going to have Democrats and I think responsible Republicans say we want to turn a controversial program that 702 already is over to a guy with no national security experience, that's a rough row to hoe.” More from POLITICO’s Cheyanne Daniels — Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) on the FISA deadline and Pulte’s appointment, on “Fox News Sunday”: “No, he's not qualified for the long-term position. That's been clear on this. He has no national security background. This is a short-term, interim, few-weeks-to-a-month-type role to be able to put him in there … And just to be clear on this, to be able to say you're not going to vote on FISA because you disagree with an interim short-term person that's stepping in to lead one of the entities, literally is sending a message to al-Qaeda and ISIS and other folks, we're not watching you right now.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
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Watch Season 1 of On the Road with Jonathan Martin From South Philly to Baltimore, Chicago, Augusta and San Francisco, Jonathan Martin hits the road for candid conversations with key political players where they call home. Catch up on Season 1 featuring Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore, JB Pritzker, Brian Kemp, Gavin Newsom and more on American politics, the road to 2026 and what’s next. Watch Season 1 now. |
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8 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR 1. TODAY’S MUST-READ: “The back-channel bid to go soft on Maduro,” by POLITICO’s Eric Bazail-Eimil and Playbook’s own Adam Wren: “A longtime investor in Venezuela, the main source of crude oil needed to produce the asphalt that had made his family rich, Harry Sargeant III kept relations with top officials in Caracas even as they seized most foreign oil holdings. … Any regime-change operation that unsettled the status quo in Caracas could have been a disaster for Sargeant, who identified newly appointed special envoy Richard Grenell as a promising potential bulwark against Rubio and Claver-Carone’s ambitions. Sargeant then recruited disgraced former Illinois congressman Aaron Schock to draw up a strategy that would elevate Grenell over [Secretary of State Marco Rubio]. “Schock and a business consultant, Benjamin Papermaster, organized a cadre of likeminded major investors and bondholders to fund a public relations campaign that spent much of 2025 pushing the Trump administration to mend fences with the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.” “Sargeant’s longtime lawyer, Christopher Kise, acknowledged in a series of letters to POLITICO over the past month that his client had hired Schock for ‘strategic consulting’ but declined to specify whether it related to Venezuela. Kise said that Sargeant did not participate in a subsequent, Schock-led influence campaign and was ‘focused on his own business interests and distanced specifically from any political outcomes.’ … In a brief text message exchange, Sargeant said “all of” POLITICO’s reporting was ‘incorrect.’” 2. DISPATCH FROM MAINE: Many national Democrats have responded to Graham Platner’s litany of controversies with some version of “Maine voters get to decide.” But talking to Democrats in Maine, Platner’s candidacy feels more an inevitability than a decision, Jessica Piper writes in from Portland. Both his supporters and detractors have little doubt he’ll prevail in Tuesday’s primary to face Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Also on the ballot are Gov. Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April, alongside 2024 candidate David Costello. Andrea Laflamme, a professor, has mounted a write-in campaign.
Few things make the lack of true choices more obvious than the state’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, where five viable candidates are seeking to succeed Mills. “People usually say to me, ‘You are all so amazing’,” said Hannah Pingree, the former state House speaker, in an interview on Saturday ahead of a Get-Out-the-Vote rally in Portland.
The gubernatorial primary uses ranked-choice voting, making it easy for voters to express support for multiple candidates. A Bangor Daily News/FairVote poll last week found Pingree a narrow frontrunner along with former public health official Nirav Shah and former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson, while clean energy executive Angus King III and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows were a bit further behind. “I have heard people say sometimes, ‘I wish one or more of them would have chosen to run for Senate,’” said Elyse Tipton, the mayor of South Portland.
3. WAR REPORT: While Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out to Congress how Iran wouldn’t get access to frozen assets or sanctions relief, the U.S. may have found a workaround in which the U.S. could let the cash-strapped Tehran access “restricted” Iranian funds in exchange for the Strait of Hormuz being reopened, POLITICO’s Nahal Toosi writes in her latest column: “This approach to getting the strait reopened would be sneaky and misleading. It would also be standard diplomacy.”
The latest: Officially 100 days into the war in Iran, negotiations to end the conflict appear to still be stalemated as both sides trade attacks, with last week being one of the biggest flare ups of the fragile ceasefire period, per Bloomberg. The ongoing conflict with Israel and Lebanon also has tensions heightened, with the latest round of Israeli airstrikes killing nine people just days after both sides announced a ceasefire deal, per AP. 4. BRAVE NEW WORLD: “‘It’s a hurricane warning’: Guardrails around powerful AI models may be too late,” by POLITICO’s Dana Nickel and Maggie Miller: “New AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT 5.5-Cyber, have advanced faster than legislation regulating the technology can keep pace. They have both shown a remarkable ability to identify software vulnerabilities and launch cyberattacks … Recent estimates suggest that the U.S. has at most six to 12 months before Beijing gains access to a frontier model with prowess comparable to Mythos or GPT 5.5-Cyber or develops an AI competitor that could eventually be wielded as a cyber weapon.”
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5. OFF THE HILL: Senior Republican senators are starting to sound the alarm on the reauthorization of FISA, the key government spy powers which expire at the end of this week. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who leads the Judiciary Committee, wrote to the White House saying they believe section 702 might not be renewed in time and to plan for a “potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection,” per Punchbowl. They tell the administration to look into other methods for intelligence gathering or a possible executive order, after negotiations fell apart earlier this week as Democrats expressed concerns over Pulte being selected as acting DNI. 6. MISSING IN ACTION: Where is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? The HHS secretary is detached from much of his sprawling agency while he homes in on his food recommendation policies and vaccine policy, NYT’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg writes. Kennedy Jr. “has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff. He rarely engages with members of Congress, colleagues said, unless he is asked to testify,” the report continues. Adding to the concerns is the department’s lack of formal appointees in top positions — with no surgeon general, and several institutes and centers led on an acting basis. But HHS spokesperson Courtney Parella Spencer said Kennedy Jr. has been “aggressively recruiting top talent to fill every remaining vacancy.” 7. MEDIAWATCH: The NYT’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro sat down with Scott Pelley, who was fired from “60 Minutes” after clashing with Bari Weiss and following a period of turmoil at CBS. Former correspondents like Pelley have accused Weiss of editorial interference and bias, while Weiss has countered that Pelley violated the “trust and mutual respect” needed to run a newsroom. On his explosive meeting with new “60 Minutes” boss Nick Bilton, Pelley recounted it from his perspective: “As we’re standing in there, Nick makes his way to the front of the room and does something absolutely jaw-dropping to me. He pulls out his phone and begins reading a statement off his phone in a room full of 50 heartbroken people. The callousness, the tone deafness of that, you could hear the groan in the room. … I felt that somebody had to stand up not just for the broadcast but for the people.” 8. BACK AGAIN: “The Bidens Return to the Stage: Online, in Bookstores and at a Best Western in South Dakota,” by NYT’s Shawn McCreesh: “The 83-year-old man who spoke in Sioux Falls would be approaching the halfway mark of his second term in office had things turned out the way he wanted. His speech Friday capped off a week that saw [Joe Biden], his wife and his son all start to return with a vengeance to the public stage, very much against the wishes of many Democrats … The publication of Jill Biden’s book this week and her subsequent publicity tour reopened deep wounds in the party as she presented her Rashomon version of how her husband’s presidency came to its painful end.”
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TALK OF THE TOWN |
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IN MEMORIAM — “Bob Packwood, senator forced to resign in sexual misconduct scandal, dies at 93,” by WaPo: “Bob Packwood, a powerful legislator and champion of women’s rights who quit the Senate in 1995 under threat of expulsion because of serial lechery and destruction of evidence of his predatory behavior, died June 6 in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 93.” SPORTS BLINK — “How do you stop Ebola at the World Cup?” by POLITICO’s Rachel Bluth and colleagues: “Now, as the three countries prepare to welcome one of the largest international gatherings around the globe since the Covid-19 pandemic, infectious diseases are front of mind. … Those state, county and city health departments face a tricky challenge as they gird for Ebola: promoting tools and strategies forged through the response to Covid but without the pandemic-era funding that helped develop them.” OUT AND ABOUT — Kathy 'Coach' Kemper hosted a farewell pickleball round robin at the Congressional Country Club yesterday for Estonian Amb. Kristjan Prikk and Liis Prikk, followed by a walk to The Great Lawn, lunch and Seabreezes, the CCC signature drink. Their next posting will be Brussels. SPOTTED: Amanda Godsoe, Dario Gil, Omair Khan, Mia and Tiina Kreek, Gris and Ty Livieri, EU Ambassador Jovita Neliupšienė and Martynas Neliupšienė, Portuguese Ambassador Francisco Duarte Lopes and Paula Lopes, Austrian Ambassador Petra Schneebauer, Icelandic Ambassador Svanhildur Hólm Valsdóttir and Logi Valsdóttir. — SPOTTED at a birthday gathering for former Biden aide Jordan Finkelstein last night at the rooftop of Players Club: Michael Posada, Yemisi Egbewole, David Ingram, Irie Sentner, Isaac James, Cameron McPherson, Patrick Kane, Caroline McKay, Haley Adams, Alex Slater, Alex Wagner, Matt Campbell, Jeff Marootian, Evan Gillissie, Kevin Barber, Haley Adams, Amy Schenk, Pete Dickos, Lisa Zhang, Stacy Eichner, Shawn Rusterholz and Michael Kikukawa. WEEKEND WEDDINGS — Liz Landers, a White House correspondent for PBS News Hour, and Jim Acosta, an independent journalist, got married last night at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington. They first met working at CNN. Pics, via Washingtonian — David Rubenstein, the investor, philanthropist and co-founder of The Carlyle Group, and Caryn Zucker, who sits on the board of several NYC cultural institutions, got married on Friday in a secret wedding officiated by Chief Justice John Roberts. Instapics HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M) … former VP Mike Pence … Wendy Sherman … Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey … SKDK’s Stephanie Reichin … Lars Anderson … Covington & Burling’s Dan Erikson … former Reps. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) and Susan Wild (D-Pa.) … Paul Kelly of the Livingston Group … Jerry White … Chrissy Barry of House Homeland Security … Microsoft’s Kaitlin Kirshner Haskins … Elizabeth Thorp … Chris Ortman … Dave Abrams … KHQ’s Bradley Warren … Myra Adams … State Department’s Jitu Sardar … Haley Dorgan 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 Giuseppe Macri and deputy editor Garrett Ross.
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A message from Vapor Technology Association: Youth vaping is at its lowest level in over twelve years — a direct result of common-sense restrictions that the vapor industry championed. The FDA's own data tells a clear story. Yet policy has failed to keep pace with science.
With new leadership now in place, Acting Commissioner Diamantas has a narrow and consequential window to deliver real reform built on three pillars: transparent, evidence-based scientific standards for PMTA review so e-cigarette manufacturers know exactly what is required; consistent enforcement against bad actors failing those standards— the actual source of the problem; and surgical enforcement criteria that target predatory design and youth-facing marketing, not the compliant products millions of American smokers depend on.
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