| | | | |  | | By Elena Schneider | | Presented by |  | | | With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine
|  | DRIVING THE DAY | | Over the last 16 or so hours, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation in two big fights that will define the near-term future of politics here in Washington. One is over a key administration post — and what that tells us about both the state of today’s Republican Party and what America under Trump 2.0 will look like. The other is for the chairmanship of the Democratic Party as it finds itself locked in the wilderness. Let’s jump right in.
|  Kash Patel's pick reaffirms that President-elect Donald Trump is looking for a staunch loyalist above all else. | José Luis Villegas, File/AP Photo | KASH IN — Last night, President-elect DONALD TRUMP picked perhaps his biggest confirmation fight yet in announcing that he intends to replace FBI Director CHRISTOPHER WRAY — whose term doesn’t expire until 2027 — with KASH PATEL. We’ll leave the in-depth explorations of Patel’s background to others, but the pick reaffirms that the president-elect is looking for a staunch loyalist above all else. Just what does Trump see in Patel?
- Patel has said he would “shut down the FBI Hoover building on day one and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.” Adds the WSJ: “He suggested that the bureau had become too powerful and that he would strip it of its intelligence-gathering role and purge it of employees who refuse to go along with Trump’s agenda.”
- He vowed that in a second Trump administration, “we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped JOE BIDEN rig presidential elections,” repeating a debunked falsehood about the 2020 election. “We’re actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”
- The Atlantic’s Elaina Plott Calabro in her definitive profile: “He wasn’t a zealot like STEPHEN MILLER, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda. Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump. Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion. This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all — his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.) What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?”
The big question: What will the Senate do, now that it has been asked?
- Sen. CHUCK GRASSLEY (R-Iowa), the incoming head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on X this morning: “Chris Wray has failed at fundamental duties of FBI Dir[.] He’s showed disdain for cong oversight & hasn’t lived up to his promises[.] It’s time 2 chart a new course 4 TRANSPARENCY +ACCOUNTABILITY at FBI[.] Kash Patel must prove to Congress he will reform &restore public trust in FBI”
- Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas), on CBS’ “Face the Nation”: “I think Kash Patel is going to be confirmed by the Senate. … I think Kash Patel is a very strong nominee to take on the partisan corruption in the FBI.”
- Sen. MIKE ROUNDS (R-S.D.), on ABC’s “This Week”: “Well, every president has the opportunity to decide who he wants to offer a nomination for. … It doesn’t surprise me that he will pick people that he believes are very loyal to himself. … But I’ll also share with you that Chris Wray, you know, who the president nominated the first time around, I think the president picked a very good man to be the director of the FBI when he did that in his first term. … I don’t have any complaints about the way that he’s done his job right now. … We’ll see what his process is, and whether he actually makes that nomination. And then, if he does, just as with anybody who is nominated for one of these positions, once they’ve been nominated by the president, then the president gets, you know, the benefit of the doubt on the nomination, but we still go through a process, and that process includes advice and consent, which, for the Senate, means advice or consent sometimes.”
- Sen. CHRIS MURPHY (D-Conn.), on “Meet the Press”: “Oh, I will vote no, and I will organize not just my colleagues but the American public to understand what's happening here. … Kash Patel’s only qualification is because he agrees with Donald Trump that the Department of Justice should serve to punish, lock up, and intimidate Donald Trump’s political opponents, and so the cost to the American public is pretty simple.”
MUSICAL CHAIRS — This morning, BEN WIKLER made it official: He wants to succeed JAIME HARRISON as chair of the DNC. The challenge he’s about to face? There is already an emerging front-runner: KEN MARTIN, as Holly Otterbein and I report. (More on that in a moment.) — First, the Wikler news: Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, turned his state into a year-round organizing and fundraising powerhouse, winning seven of the last 10 statewide elections since he took over, which has earned him plaudits across the party. Of course, he wasn’t able to help VP KAMALA HARRIS pull it off this fall, but Wikler is still a favorite of progressives and top donors alike. In an interview this morning with Playbook, Wikler pitched his plan to unite the Democratic coalition around “core messages” while “not taking a factional side,” and rebuilding the party’s infrastructure and finances to “go beyond presidential elections.” He urged Democrats to “become the narrator,” because “there’s clearly a problem when voters’ image of Democrats is generated by the far-right.” “The brand is not what Democrats say, but what voters hear and internalize,” Wikler said. “That means adapting the language that we use. It also means supporting and deploying trusted communicators. It also means figuring out where we communicate.” He told us that “key pieces of our infrastructure have disappeared over the last 20 years,” like investing in training Democratic communicators to “go on hostile territory,” including conservative media outlets, and “build[ing] up Democratic-aligned media ecosystems.” “When voters were presented with Harris’ policies and Trump’s policies, they preferred Harris’ policies,” Wikler said. “But a lot of voters only heard from the right, and we have a lot of building to do to be able to correct the imbalance of the information environment.” He also called for a 2024 post-mortem — “reckonings without recriminations,” he said — that involves the DNC and the entire party ecosystem.
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Learn more. | | | — Second, Martin who? Martin, the head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, may not have the panache of some of the marquee potential opponents, like RAHM EMANUEL — who has not entered the race — or even the name recognition of a MARTIN O’MALLEY. But what he lacks in flash he’s made up for by concentrating on the nuts and bolts of campaigning. That focus has pushed him to the front of the DNC race. The vote takes place on Feb. 1 — two months from today — and Martin has locked down nearly half the endorsements that are needed in order to win the chairmanship. (Wikler, when asked about his own endorsements, said, “the most effective vote-counters in politics don’t usually count their votes in public.”) But there’s another reason for Martin’s appeal. Though the race is widely seen as a battle over the future of the Democratic Party, some Democrats are eager to sidestep the sort of proxy war that pits the party’s progressives against its relatively moderate establishment (think of 2016 and the fight between BERNIE SANDERS and HILLARY CLINTON). Martin’s wielding that as a selling point. “The key for a successful party chair is to get all of those various ideological wings of your party to work together,” said Martin. “For me, it doesn’t really matter where I stand on any of that, because my job is to make sure that we are winning elections.” But does that neutrality mean avoiding a needed serious conversation? “Maybe the best thing is for the Democratic Party chair to be essentially a technician addressing the operations of the party,” said DAVID AXELROD, the former top adviser to BARACK OBAMA and himself a booster of Emanuel. “But someone has to ask the question, ‘How did we lose 90 percent of the counties in this country? And is that a workable model moving forward?’” But in an early attempt to understand those results, some Harris staffers and younger operatives are still stewing about the failure for more serious introspection out of her team’s top brass when they sat for their first post-election interview with “Pod Save America.” (It’s particularly ironic, one former staffer said, that “with all the shit-talking that group of people did during the campaign about the pod bros, it’s kind of funny they did that interview.") Who else could make a run? Beyond Wikler and O’Malley, New York state Sen. JAMES SKOUFIS announced a bid yesterday. Other potential candidates who are weighing campaigns include Emanuel, former New York Assemblymember MICHAEL BLAKE, former Rep. MAX ROSE (D-N.Y.), Michigan state Sen. MALLORY McMORROW, former Bernie Sanders campaign manager FAIZ SHAKIR and Dem strategist CHUCK ROCHA. But Martin has at least two advantages over that potential field: (1) Some of them would provoke the ideological infighting he’s been able to juke around; (2) with his endorsements already in place, the larger the field of DNC candidates, the more likely it would benefit Martin given his base of support. And for Democrats desperate for something to look forward to, strap in for four chair candidate forums in January. (You missed those, right?) Good Sunday morning. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels. SUNDAY BEST … — National security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN on whether Syrian President BASHAR ASSAD could fall, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “This rebel offensive is led by a group that the United States has designated as a terrorist entity, so we have concerns, obviously, about that group, and we are consulting closely with players across the region to try to determine the best way forward, because what we would like to see is the full implementation of UN Security Council resolutions that could bring a measure of peace and stability … I’m not going to make any predictions here. All I'm going to say is that we will stay deeply engaged.” — Sullivan on whether Biden is considering returning nuclear weapons to Ukraine, as has been reported, on ABC’s “This Week”: “That is not under consideration. No. What we are doing is surging various conventional capacities to Ukraine so that they can effectively defend themselves and take the fight to the Russians, not nuclear capability.” — Sullivan on whether the Biden administration can land an Israel-Hamas cease-fire deal, on CBS’ “Face the Nation”: “We’re driving at this with everything we've got. We think we have a chance, but we won’t rest until we get it done. … The key actor right now holding the decision on the cease-fire is Hamas.” — North Carolina Gov.-elect JOSH STEIN on whether he’ll work with Trump on deportations, on “This Week”: “He says a lot, and then you don’t know what the actual policy behind the bluster is going to be, and so I have to wait to see what he actually proposes … Right now, if folks break the law and harm North Carolinians, they get deported as it is. Folks who are law-abiding, deporting them is not a priority at all.” — Hagerty on Trump’s tariff threats, on “Meet the Press”: “Access to our economy is a privilege. If you think about it, we’ve made access to this economy a strategic tool ever since World War II. … Right now, the United States has the most open market of any major economy in the world. We need to take a very hard look at countries that don't have our best interests at heart, countries that are allowing our borders to be violated, and use those tariffs as a tool to achieve our ends.” TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
| | | | A message from Instagram:   | | | | | WHAT'S HAPPENING TODAY | | At the White House Biden and first lady JILL BIDEN will speak at a World AIDS Day event at 2:30 p.m. on the South Lawn. At night, he’ll depart the White House to travel to Sal, Cape Verde. Harris has nothing on her public schedule.
| | | | 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. | | | | | | | PLAYBOOK READS | | | |  Canadian PM Justin Trudeau met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | 9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR 1. TRADE WARS: In his latest social-media threat, Trump warned that the bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa would be slapped with 100 percent tariffs if they moved away from using the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. More from Bloomberg Meanwhile, Trump met with Canadian PM JUSTIN TRUDEAU in the wake of his 25 percent tariff threat on America’s immediate neighbors. Trump and Trudeau called the dinner productive, with the president-elect saying Trudeau had promised to take action on immigration and fentanyl crackdowns: Canada would examine deploying more resources to its southern border, per Bloomberg’s Josh Wingrove. Nonetheless, Trudeau went back home without having extracted a trade reprieve from Trump. Around the U.S., small businesses are bracing for economic fallout from Trump’s tariffs, NBC’s Alexandra Byrne reports. Some are trying to stockpile inventory or search for cost-cutting measures. But many business owners also anticipate that they may have to pass higher costs on to consumers. 2. THE ENFORCER: Trump announced that he’ll select CHAD CHRONISTER as his nominee for head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, per NYT’s Mark Walker. That would elevate the current sheriff of Hillsborough County, Florida, who has taken part in statewide and regional law enforcement efforts. Chronister would play a leading role in Trump’s efforts to continue turning the tide on the opioid epidemic. Notably, Chronister’s father-in-law received a pardon from Trump in the final days of his first term. 3. SPEAKING OF PARDONS, PART I: Real estate developer CHARLES KUSHNER is Trump’s pick for U.S. ambassador to France, the president-elect announced, per CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo and Isabelle D’Antonio. Kushner, of course, is the father of Trump’s son-in-law JARED KUSHNER, and he received a pardon from Trump as well after going to prison for a 2005 federal conviction driven by CHRIS CHRISTIE. 4. SPEAKING OF PARDONS, PART II: “Trump promised Jan. 6 pardons. His post-election silence is making loyalists nervous,” by Kyle Cheney: “Federal judges overseeing Jan. 6 cases have been left to guess at Trump’s plans. As a result, they have allowed nearly all cases to proceed, saying Trump’s clemency plans are merely ‘speculative.’ Meanwhile, federal prosecutors have brought a handful of new Jan. 6 felony cases … Adding to the anxiety expressed by some Jan. 6 defendants is a statement from Trump’s transition team [about ‘case-by-case’ decision-making] that hinted at a far more limited approach than the sweeping pardons that many in Trump’s base have demanded.”
| | | | A message from Instagram:   | | | 5. SPEAKING OF PARDONS, PART III: Ahead of his sentencing for federal gun and tax offenses, HUNTER BIDEN’s legal team yesterday issued an impassioned 52-page document alleging that he’d been targeted for political reasons, per WaPo’s Matt Viser. But it “largely rehashes past arguments” that have been deployed “at times unsuccessfully in court.” Though the president has said he won’t pardon his son or commute his sentences, the new document “at times seems aimed directly” at trying to influence the elder Biden. 6. THE BIG PICTURE: “Trump’s shock and awe,” by Axios’ Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei: “Two seemingly unrelated behind-the-scenes Mar-a-Lago dramas capture the shock soon to pound Washington: ELON MUSK, the most powerful and persistent voice in President-elect Trump’s ear, has been relentless in pushing ‘radical reform’ of, well, almost everything. … Trump has been telling friends he denied ROBERT LIGHTHIZER — his pro-tariff, China-hawk U.S. trade representative in the first term — a Cabinet role because he’s ‘too scared to go big.’ He's loyal but too timid to take big, risky swings, Trump contends. … “Trump advisers are running out of words to describe what’s coming in January. They say he feels empowered and emboldened, vindicated and validated, and eager to stretch the boundaries of power. He’s egged on by Musk and others — and picking trusted brawlers for the toughest, most controversial tasks.” Also notable: Patel was reportedly likely to be picked for the lower-profile role of deputy FBI director, but Missouri AG ANDREW BAILEY flubbed his interview for the top role, one source tells them. 7. RACE FOR THE HOUSE: “The congressional battlegrounds were set. Then Trump changed everything,” by Ally Mutnick: “Republicans and Democrats alike had largely assumed the battlefield was set … But Trump’s improvement with Hispanic communities — one of the most dramatic shifts emerging from the 2024 election — is blowing all of that up, leaving Republicans plotting how to capitalize on Trump’s success and Democrats scrambling to keep a once-loyal demographic in the fold. … Republicans will have a wider path to grow their House majority — if they can figure out how to take advantage of Trump’s inroads in these Latino-heavy areas in Nevada, New Mexico, South Texas, Central California and Florida.” 8. GEORGIA ON MY MIND: As Georgia’s ruling party cracks down on protests over a questionable election and gets closer to Russia, the U.S. pressed pause yesterday on its strategic partnership with the country, Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing and Gabriel Gavin report. The suspension came in the wake of Georgian Dream pausing its process of joining the EU, which the State Department blasted as contrary to the will of the Georgian people. Reportedly, Georgian Ambassador to the U.S. DAVID ZALKALIANI has also resigned. 9. KNOWING HOWARD LUTNICK: “Trump’s Commerce Pick Hawked Buzzy Investments That Went Bust,” by WSJ’s Rachel Louise Ensign and Amrith Ramkumar: “Lutnick made SPACs a big focus in recent years. The deals made money for Cantor [Fitzgerald], but many worked out badly for ordinary investors.”
| | | | 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. | | | | | | | PLAYBOOKERS | | Kristi Noem laid the groundwork for years to become an immigration hard-liner. Lai Ching-te wants Donald Trump to keep protecting Taiwan. Kevin Cramer doesn’t want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act wholesale. Ursula von der Leyen wants to boost EU defense spending. Elon Musk helped turn South Texas red. Kamala Harris stopped by Bold Fork Books. IN MEMORIAM — “A. Cornelius Baker, Champion of H.I.V. Testing, Dies at 63,” by NYT’s Richard Sandomir: “[He] spent nearly 40 years working with urgency and compassion to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS by promoting testing, securing federal funding for research and pushing for a vaccine … A policy wonk and health-care expert, he held positions in the federal government and with nonprofits.” WELCOME TO THE WORLD — Samantha Bullock, EVP at OnMessage Public Strategies, and Chasen Bullock, CEO and co-founder of Caliber Contact, welcomed Charlie on Monday. He joins big brothers Henry and Benjamin. Pic … Another pic HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) … Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) … Steve Benjamin … Jen Psaki … WaPo’s Karen Tumulty … Shin Inouye … Josh Kraushaar of Jewish Insider … Mandela Barnes … Tessa Gould … NPR’s Carrie Johnson … Ammar Moussa … POLITICO’s Elizabeth Ralph, John Diaz, Joshua Sztorc and Abby Resendiz … Jason Maloni of JadeRoq … Kyle Lierman … NYT’s Carlos Prieto … Joel Miller … Barbara Martin of the Brand Guild … Moses Mercado of Ogilvy Government Relations … Sara Guerrero … Ed Fox of Fox & Associates … Tyler Haymore … Raul Alvillar … Ani Toumajan … Alex Howard … Yochi Dreazen … David Jory of Edge Creek Partners … Jacqueline Feldscher … Sarah March-Gómez of Bay Public Relations … Jordan Lieberman … Natalie Wyeth Earnest … Sean Higgins … Rashida Kamal Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. Send Playbookers tips to playbook@politico.com or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.
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