| | | | |  | | By Ian Ward | |  Linda McMahon speaks during the last day of the 2024 Republican National Convention. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images | CHALK ONE UP FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT — For months, conservatives in Washington have been anxiously waiting for Donald Trump to announce the leaders of his official presidential transition team. The stakes of Trump’s choice were higher than usual: In the eyes of many conservative insiders, the announcement wouldn’t just indicate who might be in charge of laying the foundation of a possible second Trump administration. It would also signal which side Trump is taking in a bitter internecine rivalry that has pitted the MAGA movement’s most ardent insurgents against the more establishmentarian elements of the GOP. Today, conservatives got their answer: Trump — at least in public — is siding with the establishment. That was the message that Trump’s campaign telegraphed to conservative insiders by selecting the two co-chairs of its transition team: Linda McMahon and Howard Lutnick. (The transition leadership team, which is in charge of the recruitment of personnel and crafting policy plans in case Trump wins in November, also includes Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and the former president’s two sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, as honorary chairs.) McMahon and Lutnick both have close ties to Mar-a-Lago. McMahon — the founder and former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment — served as the administrator of the Small Business Administration during the Trump administration, and Lutnick — the billionaire CEO of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald — has been a major donor to Trump’s past campaigns. More importantly, though, McMahon most recently served as the chair of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), one of the two Washington-based conservative think tanks that has been vying for influence over Trump’s official transition effort. AFPI’s transition project has been upstaged by its primary rival, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, but its mission has been largely the same: to build a stable of personnel and policy proposals to aid Trump’s transition to the White House should he win in November. Despite their shared mission, there’s been a fierce “shadow war” between the two groups. “AFPI and Heritage hate each other with a passion,” a Trump operative told The Daily Beast late last year. The source of the conflict is both ideological and personal: Project 2025, run by Heritage president Kevin Roberts, has become home to the younger and more diehard MAGA members of Trump’s old White House team, while AFPI — which is run by McMahon and former Trump advisors Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow — is widely seen as a hub for Republicans who are more sympathetic to the old, pre-Trump conservative consensus. (In the White House, Rollins championed Trump’s libertarian-inflected criminal justice reform package, and Kudlow worked to soften Trump’s protectionist agenda on trade.) After taking hold behind closed doors, the feud between AFPI and Heritage has become increasingly public — and nasty. In September 2023, the Financial Times published an email from a senior Project 2025 advisor to AFPI arguing that AFPI’s transition project was a “Trojan Horse by which the establishment can retake control of personnel.” A Trump advisor shot back at Heritage in November, telling The Daily Beast, “At least the people at AFPI, half of them worked for the administration ... Heritage is trying to figure out a way to be relevant.” The skirmish between the two groups has been further complicated in recent months by the Trump’s campaign’s efforts to distance itself publicly from Project 2025, culminating in the resignation of the project’s director, Paul Dans, in late July. Dans’ resignation has largely failed to shift attention away from Project 2025, and a series of reports documenting the project’s ties to Mar-a-Lago have fueled doubts about Trump’s disavowals. (A spokesperson for Heritage declined to comment.) But beyond Heritage, the controversy surrounding Project 2025 was seen by many in the MAGA orbit as benefitting AFPI, which has largely avoided generating the sort of media scrutiny and Democratic attacks that Project 2025’s aggressive self-promotion attracted. Those suspicions got a boost from Trump’s selection of McMahon, which Rollins praised in a post on social media today, adding, “I can think of no better person to help lead President Trump’s formal transition efforts than [Linda McMahon].” That said, it may be too early to tell whether McMahon’s selection marks a substantive shift in Trump’s policy outlook — and a meaningful sidelining of Heritage’s more hardcore populist-nationalist agenda — or whether Trump is merely working to placate different parts of his coalition. Trump’s selection of Vance as his vice presidential pick was widely seen as a concession to Heritage and the ‘New Right’ wing of the GOP — and a slap in the face to the party’s more establishment faction, which was reportedly spooked by Vance’s foreign-policy non-interventionism and economic protectionism. By selecting McMahon and Lutnick — a prominent businesswoman and a prominent billionaire — Trump may merely be throwing a politically-savvy bone to the Vance-skeptical parts of the MAGA coalition. But if “personnel is policy” — as Project 2025’s leaders have been saying from the get-go — then McMahon’s selection could spell bad news for Heritage and its allies. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at iward@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @ianwardreports.
| | | | DON’T MISS OUR AI & TECH SUMMIT: Join POLITICO’s AI & Tech Summit for exclusive interviews and conversations with senior tech leaders, lawmakers, officials and stakeholders about where the rising energy around global competition — and the sense of potential around AI and restoring American tech knowhow — is driving tech policy and investment. REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | | — Campus protesters ramp up plans for fall: The sudden resignation of Columbia University’s president is quickly resurfacing tensions over the Israel-Hamas war that roiled college campuses this spring — a movement primed to escalate as students return to class. Continued unrest in the Middle East and uncertainty over the new Democratic ticket’s stance on the war, an issue that already splits the party, has the potential to further accelerate campus protests. Organizers at a string of campuses have started planning demonstrations. And some schools are responding with changes to free speech rules that concern academic freedom advocates. The friction sets up a fraught return to school in a matter of days. — Key drug doesn’t work against deadly new mpox virus, study finds: A drug used in the last global mpox outbreak in 2022-23 is not effective against the more severe virus spreading rapidly in Africa, researchers have found. The antiviral, tecovirimat, did not reduce the duration of lesions among children and adults with clade I mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), according to the initial results of a placebo-controlled trial run by researchers in the DRC and the U.S. Clade I is a more dangerous type of mpox — formerly known as monkeypox — than clade II which caused a global outbreak in 2022, and is associated with more severe illness and higher fatality rates. Clade I is disproportionately affecting children, a trend not seen in the 2022 outbreak, and triggered the World Health Organization to declare a global emergency on Wednesday. — Newsom to sign bills establishing new penalties for retail theft: California Gov. Gavin Newsom will today enact a package of bills to combat retail theft, the latest gambit in a desultory, nearly year-long effort by statewide Democrats to sap momentum from a tough-on-crime initiative. The bills that Newsom signs into law will pursue many of the same aims as Proposition 36, which rolls back parts of a decade-old criminal justice reform measure by increasing penalties for certain theft and drug offenses, without requiring voter approval. The new laws enable prosecutors to add up the value of goods stolen in different locations to more easily meet the threshold for felony grand theft and create a new category for offenses by organized-crime rings.
| | |  Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on her policy platform at the Hendrick Center For Automotive Excellence in Raleigh, North Carolina today. | Grant Baldwin/Getty Images | SAME BUT DIFFERENT — Vice President Kamala Harris used a speech on her economic platform today to try to distinguish herself as a candidate from President Joe Biden, casting her agenda as more ambitious and forward-looking, reports POLITICO. The nature of Harris’ policy rollout underscored the key challenge for her truncated campaign: distancing herself from a Biden presidency dented by memories of soaring inflation and voters’ perception that conditions are getting worse, while retaining and building on the Biden policies that have largely succeeded in revitalizing the post-pandemic economy and delivering a slew of long-term benefits for the working class. AISNE-MARNE FLASHBACK — Former President Donald Trump is once again facing backlash over his comments about veterans, writes POLITICO. Trump said Thursday that the country’s top civilian honor was “much better” than its top military honor, because the service members who receive the latter are “in very bad shape” or “dead” — the latest in a yearslong pattern of inflammatory comments the former president has made about veterans as barbs over military service are being traded by both campaigns during a heated election. TULSI’S REVENGE — Former President Donald Trump has begun preparing for his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris and has brought in the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to help sharpen his attacks in a recent practice session at his private club and home, Mar-a-Lago, reports the New York Times. Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party after her 2020 presidential run and has rebranded herself as a celebrity among Trump’s base of support, has long been friendly with Trump and was briefly considered to be his running mate. But her involvement in Trump’s debate preparation was partly because of her own performance in a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, when Gabbard eviscerated Harris in a memorable onstage encounter. HOUSE GOP TARGETS WALZ — House Republicans are setting their sights on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democrats’ vice presidential candidate — the latest indication that they are using their slim majority to go after former President Donald Trump’s political opponents. Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced today that he is opening an investigation into Walz’s work related to China, including coordinating student trips, and sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray requesting a swath of documents and any correspondence with Walz related to China.
| | GO AHEAD — Ukraine can use Canadian tanks and missiles in its ongoing special military operation on Russia soil, according to Canada’s defense department. Canada places no geographic restrictions on the use of military equipment it has donated and continues to donate to Ukraine, Andrée-Anne Poulin, Canadian defense department spokesperson, told POLITICO in an email today. “Ukrainians know best how to defend their homeland, and we’re committed to supporting their capacity,” Poulin added. “Canada steadfastly supports Ukraine’s right to defend itself against Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable war — and that is why we have committed over $4 billion in military assistance to Ukraine.” BROKEN ANCHOR — Europe’s “anchor of stability” has broken loose. Just weeks after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that his fractious three-way coalition had buried the hatchet, declaring “we must not be preoccupied with ourselves” at a time of global turmoil, the civil war within his government is back with a vengeance. One might expect to find the trigger for the alliance’s conflict in Middle East policy or its stance toward Russia. In fact, the latest fight concerns a subject even more top of mind for many Germans: Das Auto. In contrast to their coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP) — the pro-business party that governs alongside Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Greens — want to encourage Germans to fire up their Volkswagens and BMWs more, not less, by making parking in downtowns free and limiting bike lanes. The push is part of what increasingly looks like a guerilla campaign by FDP leaders in recent days to trigger its coalition partners with a string of controversial initiatives, including proposals to cut welfare and abolish the federal ministry that handles foreign aid.
| | | | A YEAR OF CALIFORNIA CLIMATE: A year ago, the California Climate newsletter was created with a goal in mind — to be your go-to source for cutting-edge climate policy reporting in the Golden State. From covering Gov. Newsom's crucial China trip to leading the coverage on California's efforts to Trump-proof its climate policies, we've been at the forefront of the climate conversation. Join us for year two if you haven’t already, subscribe now. | | | | | | | | | | | | | WHAT’S IN YOUR WINE — Wine is one of the only large-scale consumer goods that doesn’t require any sort of label on the bottle indicating what’s actually in it. There’s only a relatively small list of approved products that can actually go in wine that’s sold in the United States, but some of them are surprising — polyvinylpolypyrrolidone, which is an industrial adhesive, for example. Some wine makers and advocates prefer that consumers don’t know about these products, not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re worried that they’ll get the wrong idea. The mere presence of that adhesive doesn’t necessarily make the wine worse. Still, there’s a growing sense that consumers should be able to easily know what they’re actually consuming — and there’s now a growing effort to make that happen with the wine industry. Jeff Siegel reports for Slate on attempts to add ingredient labels to wine, and why those attempts might be finally moving forward right now.
| | |  On this date in 1992: An AIDS activist smears red paint on posters of then-President George H.W. Bush reading "150,000 dead from AIDS" during a rally in Houston, Texas in the midst of the Republican National Convention. | Cliff Schiappa/AP | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
