NORFOLK, Virginia – Six months out from November, Virginia Democrats believe the governor's race is Abigail Spanberger’s to lose.

There’s a risk the former member of Congress could get bogged down by national malaise toward the Democratic Party, and her margins could end up being tight because of the negative Democratic brand.

But Democrats are hopeful that Spanberger can overcome that national dynamic. She flipped a competitive district in 2018 that stretches into rural Southwest Virginia and she benefits from the unpopular actions of President Donald Trump. His stop-and-start trade war coupled with the elimination of thousands of federal jobs and looming Medicaid cuts are widely unwelcome in the Commonwealth. Spanberger enjoys strong name recognition and is far out-fundraising her opponent, a candidate who even some fellow Republicans are wincing about.

A sweeping Democratic victory this fall could spook Republicans in Congress over their inaction to Trump’s aggressive agenda and provide a blueprint for staying laser focused on kitchen table issues like economic uncertainty and federal belt-tightening that the party can ride into the midterms next year.

“If we can get these people to vote we’re going to smoke them,” Virginia House Speaker Don Scott said. “We just got to get them to vote. That’s the fear – apathy.”

Spanberger, speaking with reporters ahead of a campaign event in the battleground region of Hampton Roads last week, shrugged off the fact that her campaign is under the national spotlight. She said the operation is “totally grounded” in Virginia and the “issues and priorities that matter here.”

“If that ends up setting a good example for other people running other places, then that's their choice,” she said before entering a packed event full of local elected officials, donors and supporters in Norfolk, to mark the launch of her affordability agenda calling for lowering health care and prescription drug costs. She’s readying forthcoming plans to address other strains on Virginians’ budgets.

Selling strong messages on affordable housing, rural hospitals and public schools will help Democrats appeal to the more conservative parts of the state in Southwest and Central Virginia, said Aaron Rouse, a state senator and one of six Democrats running for lieutenant governor. Spanberger is “doing everything right so far,” he said.

Spanberger raised $6.7 million in the first quarter, dwarfing the $3.1 million brought in by opponent Winsome Earle-Sears, the lieutenant governor who was limited by state law from fundraising during the state legislative session earlier this year.

Early polling shows Spanberger is in a strong position: A Roanoke College survey this month showed her with a 17 percentage point lead, and more than half of respondents believe the country is on the wrong track. Another poll put the race at a much tighter margin, with Spanberger leading by four points.

But Spanberger’s campaign may run into the strong negative headwinds around the Democratic Party, which has been trying to reverse pessimistic attitudes toward its leaders. National Democrats believe that if Spanberger can broaden her appeal beyond the blue strongholds of Northern Virginia by convincingly talking about kitchen table issues, that will give them a much-needed morale boost and help guide them in the midterms.

Spanberger is focusing her campaign for governor on how she plans to lower costs – and blaming Trump in Washington and term-limited Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in Richmond for making life more expensive. Virginia’s off-year elections are viewed as a referendum on the party controlling Washington, and Democrats are feeling confident as Trump’s DOGE cuts come down hard on Virginia’s robust federal workforce.

A recent analysis from the University of Virginia found that the state is projected to lose more than 9,000 government jobs, propelling a downturn in employment that is worrying state leaders.

“[Trump] creates the general political environment that you're in,” said Virginia-based Democratic strategist Ben Tribbett. “She's done a pretty good job of surfing that wave, of bringing more people into the party when they're not happy with what the Trump administration is doing.”

November turnout may answer how much Democrats can count on Trump’s disassembling of the federal government as a motivating issue in the midterms. Virginia Democrats, confident that Elon Musk’s unpopularity will linger even as his term as a special government employee has expired, point to Department of Defense workers and contractors living in the more competitive Hampton Roads area who lost their jobs as evidence that anger over DOGE is not just limited to the northern part of the state.

Youngkin has defended the cuts as necessary to trim government waste, and encouraged out-of-work Virginians to pursue other open jobs in the state. His office has created a website to connect former federal workers to new positions. Earle-Sears was captured on leaked audio in April saying that “we don’t want people to lose their jobs” but downplayed the losses.

"Abigail Spanberger is dusting off the same worn-out playbook that cost Democrats the governor’s mansion in 2021," said Peyton Vogel, press secretary for the Earle-Sears campaign, in a statement, referring to when Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe. "Back then, Virginians rejected fear mongering messaging and chose a leader with real solutions to make life more affordable and move the Commonwealth forward. Spanberger's current strategy failed then, and replaying it now won’t change the outcome."

Moderate Democrats see Spanberger as the ideal candidate to confirm their view that the party should shift toward the middle. In 2018, she defeated Tea Partier Rep. Dave Brat in an upset, joining the wave of women elected to Congress on a wave of anti-Trump energy. But Trump is much more popular than he was in his first term, so appealing to his voters becomes a crucial part of the comeback strategy.

In her first campaign ad launched this week, Spanberger highlighted her bipartisan voting record while serving in Congress. In 2022, after Democrats came close to losing the House, she was captured on leaked audio criticizing Democrats for embracing positions defunding the police and warned them to “never use the word socialism again.”

“Her biggest vulnerability is being a Democrat in this moment, but she is sufficiently defining herself as a different kind of Democrat,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the center-left group Third Way. “She watched carefully what happened to us in 2024 and is trying not to make the same mistakes, just trying to keep her focus on the things that voters actually care about and not get distracted by things that they don't.”

Democrats view Hampton Roads, a competitive area that Spanberger needs to win, as the epicenter of several of Trump’s policies. In addition to DOGE layoffs, the Port of Virginia located here is bracing for a decline in shipments from other major trading partners.

It's also a popular vacation destination for America's neighbors to the north. Virginia Beach State Del. Michael Feggans, a Democrat running for reelection in one of the most competitive state legislative races, said he’s heard from local business leaders concerned about the decline of Canadian tourists annoyed by Trump’s annexation talk. Democrats are aiming to expand their one-seat majority in the state House, and are adopting a similar economic message as Spanberger to try to make that happen.

“He said on day one he was going to fix the price of everything and bring world peace, and there's been nothing but chaos, confusion, and people are scared and people are worried,” Feggens said.

Virginia Republicans, on the other hand, are banking on DOGE being a distant memory when voters head to the polls in November. Those Republicans are skeptical that Spanberger’s anti-Trump message will resonate beyond the Democratic base, and they insist that swayable voters.

“Her entire message seems to be: Trump sucks,” said a Republican operative granted anonymity to speak freely. “When you get down to brass tacks, people want to see what exactly are you going to do.”

© Bryan Woolston, File/AP

Dr. Mehmet Oz, former TV host and Pennsylvania Senate candidate, is one of America’s most famous physicians. Now he’s running the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which means he’s in charge of programs that provide health care for about half of all Americans. He sits down with White House Bureau Chief Dasha Burns to discuss potential Medicaid cuts, his big plans to lower drug pricing, why he’s fielding early morning phone calls from President Donald Trump, and his advice to patients to “be curious” about their health.

Plus, Burns is joined by senior political columnist and politics bureau chief Jonathan Martin to discuss his juicy column about the Ohio governor’s race featuring Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel. And senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney joins to discuss the showdown between Trump and the courts over his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Listen and subscribe to The Conversation with Dasha Burns on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

© The Conversation with Dasha Burns

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — Democrats here took a vital first step in delivering Joe Biden the presidency five years ago. Now, they're hoping his tarnished legacy won’t jeopardize their future as an early primary state.

Already, there are hints some Democrats will revert to New Hampshire holding the party’s initial primary contest, while progressives want to see labor-heavy Nevada take the lead. And there's even talk of friendlier southern states, like Georgia or North Carolina, leapfrogging South Carolina.

“The unfortunate part is, Democrats are saying that, and they think that [South Carolina leading] is a bad part of Biden's legacy,” said Bre Booker-Maxwell, a national committeewoman, Saturday on the sidelines of the state party’s convention.

She questioned the rationale of such a decision, before answering herself. “The fact that the man ran the second time, and he probably shouldn't have run?” she asked skeptically. “Some people just need to get over themselves and whatever issues they have with Joe Biden.”

Attempts to move past Biden and the bad aftertaste of 2024 got underway this weekend as state party insiders hosted a pair of out-of-state governors with obvious, but still publicly undeclared, sights on the 2028 nomination.

Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Tim Walz of Minnesota took turns gracing the outdoor stage while onlookers feasted on whiting filet on white bread, at the World Famous Fish Fry, an annual tradition hosted by the state’s Democratic kingmaker, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.).

Walz, the first to greet the crowd, spoke of the missteps from the last cycle and Democrats needing to expand their reach beyond a handful of swing states.

“I went to the same seven damn states over and over and over,” Walz said. “People are pissed off in South Carolina, they're pissed off in Texas, they're pissed off in Indiana. … We need to change the attitude, compete in every district, compete for every school board seat.”

Moore, who earlier Friday delivered the keynote address at the state party’s Blue Palmetto Dinner, drew cheers from the mostly Black attendees of the fish fry when he said “we come from a resilient culture” and encouraged them not to run in the face of challenge. He then pivoted to Trump and the havoc his so-called big beautiful bill would create if passed, which Moore suggested would push tens of thousands of kids into poverty while enriching the president’s billionaire buddies.

Once speeches wrapped, several in the crowd broke into line dance while South Carolina crooner 803 Fresh’s campaign anthem “Boots on the Ground” blared over loudspeakers.

It was not the rip-roaring affair of 2019 when a cavalcade of 21 presidential candidates — including Biden — wooed attendees with stump speeches. Friday night's gathering at the EdVenture Children’s Museum was held as many Democrats are still grappling with the pain of widespread electoral defeats.

Biden’s return to the national spotlight — through negative coverage detailing how those in his inner circle shielded the president's deteriorating condition from the outside world — has only resurfaced some long-held misgivings about his legacy.

“All this talk about President Biden and what should have and what could have, what might have, is a bunch of bullshit,” said Trav Robertson, a longtime Democratic operative and former chair of the state party. “We can peck that to death if you want to, but that is in the past. South Carolina represents going into the future.”

South Carolina, a state where Black Democrats make up a substantial portion of primary voters, played a pivotal role resurrecting Biden’s moribund campaign. When Clyburn threw his support behind Biden ahead of the South Carolina primary in 2020, it vaulted him to the nomination and later, the presidency. In return, Biden pressured the Democratic Party to upend its traditional nomination calendar by moving the state to the lead-off position.

But that electoral situation was tenuous. By running for reelection, Biden sapped energy out of the 2024 primary. Now, party officials are bracing for its status as the kickoff state to be ripped away.

“I think it would be a mistake to act like South Carolina's place [at the top] is just because of Biden, when this has been a conversation we've been having for 20 years,” said Nick Sottile, an attorney and executive director of the South Carolina House Democrats.

Like nearly every Democrat in the state, he points out the benefits of South Carolina are vast. In addition to paying homage to a vital Democratic voting bloc, the small state with relatively cheap media markets won’t bankrupt campaigns, which can hit upstate, midlands and the coast — a mix of urban, suburban and rural areas — all on a single tank of gas. Then there’s the robust defense of South Carolina primary voters' history of picking presidents — Bill Clinton in 1992, Barack Obama in 2008 and Biden in 2020 — particularly in contrast to New Hampshire and Iowa.

“We get it right, and it's a proven track record,” Sottile added. “It's not one election and one candidate that we're talking about.”

That feeling is not shared by many outside the state.

A longtime member of the DNC’s committee that helps determine the presidential primary order granted anonymity to discuss informal discussions suggested South Carolina’s current spot atop the calendar will undoubtedly come under scrutiny in the coming months.

“Clearly South Carolina members will want to continue to be first in the calendar for obvious reasons,” the person said. “I think that no one else is going to feel any kind of obligation to keep South Carolina at the top of the calendar — because Biden is gone.”

Biden may have unintentionally shattered South Carolina’s standing next cycle, which only adds to a sense of betrayal over his role in ushering in another Trump presidency.

“There are people who are just mad as hell about everything that happened in 2024,” said Sam Skardon of Charleston.

He admits he was one of the few in the state party who believed Biden’s promise to be a “bridge” candidate to the next generation. He took the job as chair of the Charleston County Democrats in March 2023 hoping to preside over a robust primary. A month later, Biden announced his reelection bid.

“There's a special connection here that’s a deeper attachment, I think, than most states' Democratic Parties have to President Biden, probably up there with Delaware for thinking of him as our own,” Skardon added. “But yeah, then there is additional anger, I think, at Biden for … not not letting us put our best foot forward.”

Some believe Biden is simply too convenient a scapegoat for the party’s broader problems. Backpedaling on giving Black voters more of a say in picking the party’s nominee could erode trust in a bloc that's already drifting away from the party.

“It is a slap in the face … to Black Americans, where people are questioning Joe Biden at this point,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist who resumed his role as emcee of the fish fry. “It was Joe Biden who had the steel spine, the guts and the courage to declare that Black Americans' voices should be heard first in the presidential preference process.”

But Seawright also shared concerns that too many voters here view Democrats as out of touch.

“I think trust was a part of the formula for Trump's success in the last election cycle,” Seawright added. “You had some people who, in my opinion, did not necessarily vote for Donald Trump, they voted against the Democratic brand.”

At the Palmetto Dinner, Jaime Harrison, the chair emeritus of the Democratic National Committee and Orangeburg, South Carolina, native revved up the crowd by putting a positive spin on the party’s standing in state since Biden left the stage.

“We are more organized, we are more energized, and we are more focused than ever before,” he said, heaping praise on the state’s party chair Christale Spain who was elected to a second term on Saturday. “I am going to be on record right now to the South Carolina Republican Party, 2026 is going to be a reckoning.”

Amanda Loveday, a Democratic strategist based in Columbia who worked on Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, is another South Carolina defender. But she is less optimistic given South Carolina’s Democrats, who have long been locked out of power in the state, suffered setbacks last cycle.

“We lost [state] Senators and House members that we have absolutely no business losing,” Loveday said, which included two prominent Black lawmakers including state Sen. Gerald Malloy and state Rep. Joseph Jefferson.

Republicans flipped four state Senate seats last cycle, leaving just 12 Democrats in the chamber. And in the presidential election, Trump’s victory was never in doubt, but he increased his margin by 6 percentage points over 2020.

All this is fueling speculation that South Carolina’s neighbors — North Carolina and Georgia — which have notched statewide wins for Democrats in recent cycles, have better arguments to hurdle South Carolina in the primary calendar.

© Brakkton Booker/POLITICO

When top figures in President Donald Trump’s orbit descended on a small town in southeastern Poland this week to rally support for the right-wing candidate in that country’s presidential election on Sunday, they put MAGA’s ambitions abroad on full display.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Karol Nawrocki “just as strong a leader” as Trump, declaring “he needs to to be the next president of Poland.” Matt Schlapp, chair of the pro-Trump Conservative Political Action Conference, which hosted the gathering, said electing candidates like Nawrocki is “so important to the freedom of people everywhere,” while John Eastman, who aided Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, said Poland under Nawrocki would play “a critical role in defeating [the] threat to Western civilization.”

But if the conservative confab ahead of Poland’s vote was an indication of how hard Trump’s allies have been working to expand the MAGA brand across the globe, the results of recent elections, including in Romania, Poland and Canada, suggest Trump’s influence in some cases may not be helping.

“Just like domestically, you see one step forward, two steps back sometimes,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and State Department appointee in Trump's first administration. “The thought of Trump and MAGA is sometimes more powerful than the reality.”

He said, “His thumbprint can help push in certain regions and countries, but there can also be some pushback.”

Trump’s election to a second term in November emboldened far-right movements abroad. It gave Trump’s allies hopes of putting like-minded leaders into positions of power, boosting parties that share his priorities and spreading his populist, hard-right politics beyond the U.S. Meanwhile, conservative politicians in other countries yoked themselves directly or stylistically to his brand.

In the months since, far-right parties have performed strongly in European elections, including in Poland, Romania and Portugal, overperforming expectations and elevating their vote shares with electorates shifting to the right on issues like immigration. The hard-right in Europe, by most accounts, is surging. But they’re not vaulting into government like some Trump allies had predicted.

“I wouldn't say the right has ascended, I'd say it's a mixed package,” said Kurt Volker, who served as Trump’s envoy for Ukraine during his first administration and ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush. “There is a movement effect where the far-right movements seem to draw energy from each other and do well. But there's also this anti-Trump effect, where Trump has challenged a country or a leader and that has only backfired and helped them.”

In Romania, hard-right presidential candidate George Simion, who spoke at this year’s CPAC in Washington and appeared on Trump ally Steve Bannon’s podcast just days before the country’s election this month, lost to a centrist challenger after dominating the first round of voting. In Albania, conservatives hired former Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita to boost their fortunes, only to see their candidate get trounced anyway.

And the movement is bracing for a close election on Sunday in Poland, where Nawrocki — who visited the White House earlier this month — is locked in a tight race with centrist candidate Rafal Trzaskowski after finishing behind him in the first round.

“We have a lot of political leaders here in the U.S. who are camping out in Poland to try to tilt it,” said Randy Evans, who was ambassador to Luxembourg during Trump’s first term. “Whether or not that's enough or not … I don't know. I think it's going to be very close.”

Trump’s allies have been working since his first term to expand MAGA’s influence abroad. Bannon, who had managed Trump’s 2016 campaign, began traveling across Europe pitching himself as the mastermind behind a new global far-right alliance called “The Movement.” He even announced he would set up an academy to train future right-wing political leaders at a former monastery outside Rome.

Those efforts largely fizzled at the time: Bannon’s planned academy got caught up in yearslong legal battles, and support for far-right parties across the continent tanked in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

But rising inflation and growing concerns over immigration helped far-right parties gain back support as the pandemic faded. By the time Trump won the election last November, many of those parties were resurging — and his victory emboldened them further, with far-right allies quickly seeking to tie themselves to the incoming U.S. president and his orbit.

When Vice President JD Vance chastised European leaders for “running in fear of [their] own voters” at the Munich Security Conference in February, he billed the Trump administration as an alternative model — the vanguard of a hard-right movement not only in the United States, but across the West.

“Make Europe Great Again! MEGA, MEGA, MEGA,” Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s billionaire ally, posted on X earlier this year.

In the months since the vice president’s appearance in Germany, hardline conservatives have had some success. In Portugal, the far-right Chega party surged. And Reform UK, the party led by pro-Brexit leader Nigel Farage, made big gains in the country’s local elections earlier this month.

CPAC, which has been holding international conferences since 2017 — including in Japan, Australia, Brazil and Argentina — gathered supporters in Hungary following the Poland meeting this week.

Schlapp did not respond to a request for comment. But he told NPR, “The one thing that's undeniable is that everybody wants to know where Donald Trump is on the issues that matter to their country” and said, “They're really rooting for Donald Trump to succeed.”

But elsewhere abroad, MAGA-style politics not only has failed to spread — it has been a liability. In both Canada and Australia, Trump’s combative and unpredictable trade policy led to an anti-Trump wave that helped tank right-wing candidates who sought to emulate his rhetoric.

Canada’s Pierre Poilievre ran on a “Canada First” slogan and Australia’s Peter Dutton proposed DOGE-style cuts to government. But Trump’s tariffs were deeply unpopular with voters in both countries, and even though Poilievre and Dutton distanced themselves from Trump in the final days of the campaign, voters punished them anyway.

Vance’s speech in February “gave the impression that this is becoming a transatlantic right-wing alliance,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. “Since then, the reality is … not as drastic as those worst-case scenarios. And that’s not because they’re not trying. You see how the White House is trying.”

Trump’s allies went all-in on the May 18 election in Romania, which was the re-run of a November vote annulled over concerns that a Russian influence campaign on TikTok had affected the outcome. Trump allies had criticized the decision to cancel the original results and bar the winning candidate, ultranationalist Călin Georgescu, from running in the new election.

MAGA loyalists spent months touting Simion, the hard-right candidate who promised to “Make Romania Great Again.” Less than two weeks before Election Day, Simion hosted CPAC’s  Schlapp at a business roundtable in Bucharest, and two days before Romanian voters cast their ballots, Bannon hosted Simion on his “War Room” podcast.

“George, you've got the entire MAGA movement here in the United States pulling for you,” Bannon said, predicting victory for the Trump-aligned candidate.

But when the votes were counted, it wasn’t even close. Simion lost the election by 7 points to Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan, a centrist candidate who promised closer ties with the European Union and NATO.

In Albania’s May 11 parliamentary elections, where the conservative candidate, Sali Berisha, hired LaCivita to help his party make a political comeback, the party in interviews heralded Trump and Berisha’s “remarkably similar profiles” of being “persecuted by establishments” and “targeted by their countries’ justice systems.” Berisha’s supporters touted LaCivita’s involvement as proof Berisha was anointed by the MAGA movement.

But on Election Day, Berisha’s party lost badly, handing incumbent Edi Rama and his Socialist Party another term in office.

Rama wasted no time in gloating: Hiring Trump’s campaign strategist and thinking you can become Trump “is like hiring a Hollywood hairdresser and thinking you’ll become Brad Pitt,” he told POLITICO after the vote.

LaCivita told POLITICO on Friday that the connection between MAGA in the U.S. and conservative movements abroad stems from a common concern about an “alignment of issues — governments using their judicial systems to prosecute political opponents, the rising cost of living, reduced opportunities and individual liberties.”

“This alignment was defeated with President Trump’s win in 2024, and while that success may not always be repeated worldwide — once again America is being looked at to provide leadership in securing freedom,” he said in a text message. “Not through the barrel of a gun — but politics.”

Trump spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that Trump’s “message of restoring common sense, halting illegal immigration, and delivering peace resonates with not just Americans, but people around the world, which is why conservatives have been winning elections in all corners of the globe. He is simultaneously restoring America’s strength on the world stage, as evidenced by the 15 foreign leaders who have visited the White House this term.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies have largely dismissed defeats abroad, with explanations ranging from blaming the “deep state” to arguing that losing politicians were not sufficiently Trumpian to win.

"MAGA's populist, nationalist, sovereignist right continues to rise despite the full force of the deep state being thrown against it,” Bannon told POLITICO in response to the spate of recent elections.

“These people aren’t Donald Trump. They’re facsimiles,” Raheem Kassam, a former Farage adviser and ex-Breitbart London editor, said of Simion and Nawrocki, noting that their parties are both part of a faction on the European level that has its roots more in traditional conservatism than the MAGA-style populism of far-right parties in Germany, Austria, France and others.

“They’re cheap copies that have been run through a copy machine 40 times,” he added. “It doesn’t work. It’s faded. It’s counterfeit Trumpism.”

Poland, where leaders of the right-wing Law and Justice Party have long cultivated ties to Trump and MAGA loyalists, will offer the next test of whether an affiliation with Trump can help put like-minded candidates over the finish line.

Nawrocki, the Law and Justice Party-backed candidate for president, has gone all-in on his efforts to tie himself to Trump — including flying to Washington in early May for a photo op at the White House.

“President Trump said, ‘you will win,’" Nawrocki told the Polish broadcaster TV Republika. “I read it as a kind of wish for my success in the upcoming elections, and also awareness of it, and after this whole day I can say that the American administration is aware of what is happening in Poland.”

But public opinion polling shows Poles, who have long been among the U.S.’ biggest fans in Europe, are souring on both the country and its current leader amid tariffs and Trump’s close ties to Russia — a tricky issue in a country where many people still view Russia as a threat.

Asked by a Polish public polling agency in April whether the U.S. has a positive impact on the world, just 20 percent said yes — the lowest figure since the poll was first conducted in 1987, and down from 55 percent a year ago. And 60 percent of Poles said they were “concerned” about Trump’s presidency, compared with just 15 percent who were “hopeful.”

“Trump is the most unpopular U.S. president in Europe,” said Milan Nic, an expert on Central and Eastern Europe at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “This means that to some supporters of Nawrocki, the photo from White House with Trump is no longer as powerful as it used to be.”

Volker, the former Ukraine envoy, said right-wing parties need to walk a tightrope of embracing some of the MAGA zeal — but without linking themselves too closely to the polarizing U.S. president.

“You have to think of Trump as like fire: You can't be too close, but you can't be too far away,” said Volker. “If you get too close to Trump you get burned, and if you’re too far away you’re not relevant.”

© AP Photo/Alex Brandon, Pool

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — Wes Moore made an early and urgent appeal Friday to one of the nation’s most important Democratic constituencies.

The first-term governor of Maryland said Democrats must adapt and change to counter President Donald Trump and improve life for the middle class if they have any hope of returning to power.

“Gone are the days when we are the party of bureaucracy, multi-year studies, panels and college debate club rules,” Moore said in a speech before party insiders at the South Carolina Democrats Blue Palmetto Dinner. “We must be the party of action.”

South Carolina has a track record of vaulting Democratic primary winners to the White House, and Moore’s premium speaking slot before the state's well-connected party leaders does little to tamp down speculation he’s kicking the tires on an upcoming presidential bid.

In a state where Donald Trump cruised to an 18-point victory nearly seven months ago, Moore said Democrats must also take cues from an unlikely instructor: the president himself.

“Urgency is the instrument of change. And do you know who understands that really well? Donald Trump,” Moore said. “I want to be clear: We can — and we must — condemn Donald Trump’s reckless actions. But we would also be foolish not to learn from his impatience.”

Moore talked about his roots in Charleston, where his grandfather was born, his Army service and record on crime and job creation in Maryland. He also spoke about the perilous times the country faces, and told the crowd that he is on a “mission” to help deliver adequate health care and livable wages for those who need them.

It’s a vision Moore sought to contrast with the “reckless actions” of Trump.

Moore, 46, is seen as one of the party’s most promising young stars and has caught the attention of Hollywood icon and Democratic megadonor George Clooney. While many Democrats are eager to turn the page after difficult electoral losses last cycle, the governor told the party faithful that mustering up the courage to fight can’t wait until the next presidential cycle.

“Anyone who is talking about 2028 does not understand the urgency of 2025,” Moore said.

Earlier on Friday, Moore toured the Scout Motors Production Facility in nearby Blythewood and planned to attend a campaign-style fish fry after the dinner — making his visit seem even more like a tryout for 2028.

Moore, Maryland’s first — and currently the nation’s only — Black governor has drawn the ire of a handful of Democrats back home and in South Carolina over his veto of a reparations bill passed by the state legislature. The measure called for the study of historic race-based inequality in the state.

At least one South Carolina lawmaker, state Rep. John King, called for Moore to be disinvited from the gala.

“The governor's veto doesn't just affect Maryland,” said King, who boycotted the dinner. “It echoes in every state where Black lawmakers are already working uphill. It makes our jobs harder, and that's something we can't afford to ignore.”

The issue of reparations remains politically divisive, with a 2022 Pew Research Center survey showing that 77 percent of African Americans supported them, while less than 20 percent of white respondents did.

In the governor’s veto letter he suggested that with economic headwinds facing his state, it is an inopportune time to fund “another study.”

Moore has also followed other Democrats thought to be eyeing White House runs by sitting for more podcast interviews.

This includes a recent appearance on “The Breakfast Club” co-hosted by Charlamagne tha God and Kara Swisher’s podcast to talk about DOGE cuts and impact to his state. He recently traveled to Georgia, a key swing state, to record an episode of a podcast hosted by Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and taped a hoops workout with basketball shooting coach and influencer Chris Matthews.

A person familiar with Moore's schedule said he’s limiting the number of out-of-state invites he is accepting to focus on his role in Maryland. But the person stressed he plans to hit the campaign trail in Virginia and New Jersey — both of which hold statewide elections this fall.

© Meg Kinnard/AP

Two potential 2028 Democratic presidential primary candidates will descend on Cleveland in July to headline a rub elbows with the party’s top mayors — auditioning for another group of key surrogates in the unfolding shadow primary.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and California Rep. Ro Khanna will join Democratic Mayors Association President and Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb for a national gathering of Democratic mayors alongside DNC Chair Ken Martin, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brownand current Ohio Rep. Shontel Brown. Details were shared first with POLITICO.

“The summit will showcase our cities, the work mayors are doing to hold [President Donald] Trump accountable, deliver results, and demonstrate that government can work for the people,” said a person familiar with the planning and granted anonymity to discuss an event that was still being finalized.

The theme of the summit is “Community Over Chaos: A Path Forward.”

“I am excited to welcome my fellow Democratic mayors, special guests, and Democratic partners to my hometown of Cleveland for DMA's National Summit later this summer,” Bibb told POLITICO. “This year’s summit will be a showcase of our cities and how government at the local level still works for the people. Despite chaos in Washington, mayors continue to find solutions and deliver results each day. I can’t wait for everyone to see what Democratic mayors — and Cleveland — are all about.”

The event is in line with Bibb’s vision for the association playing a more aggressive and vocal role than in years past, and this will mark the first year that DMA’s national summit will be open to the public and press.

But it also comes at a fraught time for Democratic mayors, particularly those of big cities, who have found themselves targeted by the Trump administration.

Both Beshear and Khanna have been making early moves that are aimed at a presidential run. Beshear has hired a former spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign and started a podcast this spring. Khanna has been on a nonstop tour of media hits and party events.

But Ohio, once a swing state, has drifted even further away from Democrats in recent years. Brown, a longtime Senator who clung to his seat even as it reddened due to his ties to working-class voters, got booted last cycle. President Donald Trump won the state by 11 percentage points.

© Timothy D. Easley, File/AP

MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich. — President Donald Trump's allies are fuming at Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for getting involved in Michigan’s Senate primary, a race that now threatens to divide Republicans.

Duffy is headlining a planned June 4 fundraiser for Rep. Bill Huizenga, according to an invitation obtained by POLITICO — a move that puts Duffy at odds with the National Republican Senatorial Committee and 2024 Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita. Duffy has also been advising Huizenga, according to a person familiar with the race.

Duffy, according to the two people close to Trump, never cleared his political engagement with the White House political shop, and has now drawn the ire of Trump’s top political hands. The transportation secretary’s move to fundraise for Huizenga has now prompted threats of a crackdown on Cabinet secretaries’ political activities ahead of the midterms, POLITICO has learned.

“He did not ask for it to be approved,” a person close to Trump and granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive political matter told POLITICO of Duffy’s decision. “It would not have been approved. They are old friends and it’s technically for the House so not going to embarrass him by standing it down, but the fact is administration officials are not free agents politically, even in their spare time. You never get ahead of the President.”

Huizenga has told others that a second Cabinet official could fundraise for him but they're settling on a date. One of the people familiar with Trump's thinking said they would not allow that to happen.

The White House declined to comment.

A spokesperson for Duffy did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Rogers declined to comment.

Trump hasn’t decided who to endorse yet in Michigan’s Senate race, according to two people close to the president, a contest that arguably represents Republicans’ best chance to widen their majority.

National Republicans have coalesced behind former Rep. Mike Rogers in the Republican’s second run for the office, but Huizenga has been taking steps toward a run.

Huizenga spent the week at a gathering of Michigan strategists and elected officials on Mackinac Island preparing a run against Rogers and courting prominent national donors, emphasizing in conversations that Rogers failed to beat Democrat Elissa Slotkin for an open Senate seat in the same year Trump won the state.

“I want to make sure we win,” Huizenga told POLITICO when he said he could announce a Senate bid as early as this summer. “The question is: Are we going to run the same play and expect a different result?”

Huizenga’s plans undermine the National Republican Senatorial Committee's plans to clear the field for Rogers, a former Trump critic. Rogers hired LaCivita as his senior adviser.

The Republican establishment — including the top echelons of Trump world — have started to coalesce around Rogers as the nominee.On Wednesday, NRSC political director Brendan Jaspers reposted a poll on X showing Rogers outperforming Huizenga against potential Democratic rivals and suggesting that “the numbers point to one candidate” who can flip the seat for Republicans: Rogers.

© Rod Lamkey, Jr./AP

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here's an offering of the best of this week's crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

A pro-Trump executive at The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts said he was dismissed after CNN questioned his history of anti-LGBTQ+ remarks.

Floyd Brown posted on social media Thursday that he had been removed from his post at Washington’s premier theater and cultural center just months after joining.

The Kennedy Center has faced an overhaul under President Donald Trump. During his first month, Trump fired the Center’s leadership — including former president Deborah Rutter — and filled the board of trustees with his own supporters. He also announced he had been unanimously elected the board’s chair. Several artists have canceled appearances at the Center as a result.

Brown has previously called homosexuality a “punishment” upon America and said same-sex marriage is “godless” and a “hoax,” CNN reported. He also promoted conspiracies about former President Barack Obama’s birth and religion.

He said on X that he was asked to “recant your belief in traditional marriage” and refused to do so, and that he was let go before the article was published. He accused Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell — a close ally of Trump — of being “intimidated” by CNN and alleged that Grenell, who is gay and a practicing Christian, “preemptively fired me for my Christian beliefs on marriage.”

Brown said he has asked for an explanation regarding his dismissal, along with the chance to speak with Grenell. He claims both requests have gone unanswered.

The Kennedy Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Brown said he never meant to offend anyone with his previous comments.

“Comments rooted in my personal Christian views, which I have made in the past, have no impact upon my work here at the Kennedy Center nor do they impinge on my interactions with colleagues who do incredible work for the patrons of the Center. As a Christian I am called to work with others of different beliefs and worldviews,” he said.

Brown added that he was “honored” to work at the Kennedy Center and said he was united with the Center’s and Trump’s mission “to bring wholesome entertainment showcasing the best of performing arts and music to America.”

Brown has a long history of conservative activism. He helped found the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. He also served as an executive for Young America’s Foundation, which offers support to conservative college students, and founded The Western Journal.

💾

© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

MACKINAC ISLAND, Michigan — Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga has been preparing a run for Michigan’s open Senate seat and plans to make a final decision this summer.

If he does enter the primary, he would defy national Republicans, who have been aiming to clear the field for former Rep. Mike Rogers’ second attempt at the office.

“I want to make sure we win. I want to make sure we’ve got the right candidate to do that,” Huizenga said Thursday. “I personally think it should have been won last election. It didn’t. And the question is: Are we going to run the same play and expect a different result?”

Huizenga has been assembling a team, including fundraisers, for a potential bid. He recently traveled to West Point to discuss his candidacy with Donald Trump during the president’s visit last weekend. Last cycle, Trump endorsed Rogers, a former critic, in a crowded Senate primary; he has not endorsed in this race.

Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has been pressuring Huizenga to stay out of the contest, aiming to avert a potentially messy primary as they try to flip retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters’ seat.

National Republican Senatorial Committee political director Brendan Jaspers on Wednesday reposted a poll on X showing Rogers outperforming Huizenga against potential Democratic rivals with the message, “If Republicans want to flip Michigan’s Senate seat red in 2026, the numbers point to one candidate” — Rogers.

Democrat Elissa Slotkin defeated Rogers in Michigan’s open Senate race last year even as Trump won the state.

© Francis Chung/POLITICO

After a blitzkrieg of a book rollout that saw Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” dominate the news cycle this week with its clinical autopsy of Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, some in Biden world are hitting back, offering fresh complaints about the reporting process and their own fact checks.

When Biden’s reelection campaign needed video of him taking off-the-cuff questions from voters, they turned to a staged town hall in Delaware in April 2024 that they planned to use for a campaign commercial — an episode that went so poorly, people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material, according to Tapper and Thompson.

The pair write that at the closed-press event, even amid supporters and campaign staff that had the full list of questions, “Biden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn’t usable.”

But Biden team’s is pushing back. Three versions of test ads obtained exclusively by POLITICO tell a slightly more complicated story.

While all three are highly edited and feature jump cuts of Biden’s remarks, the footage also shows the candidate engaging with members of the audience. POLITICO viewed dated documents related to the town hall’s planning and a painting in the gym to confirm the date and location.

One is called “Greatest Nation” focusing on democracy; another is titled “They’ve Tried” on the Affordable Care Act; a third, directed at veterans, is called “Defend Us All.”

None ever aired.

Why was that? Though Tapper and Thompson report that it was because the footage “wasn’t usable,” Biden advisers argue that the footage didn’t make it on air simply because of timing.

A Biden spokesperson tells POLITICO that the campaign tested the ads with focus groups but did not deploy them before the president dropped out of the race following his disastrous June 2024 debate.

Asked about the Biden advisers’ claims, Tapper disputed the contention. In a quotation supplied to POLITICO by Tapper, an unnamed Biden adviser said: “While the campaign was able to selectively utilize portions of the footage to craft ads that were eventually tested on focus groups, the consensus from senior and mid level campaign staff present for the event and those privy to the editing process was that the footage was not up to par and would require crafty editorial support. The campaign’s leadership would not have needed to wait nearly four months to (not) release the ads created with the footage if it reflected the picture of confidence they suggest.”

POLITICO has been unable to independently verify the identity of the unnamed Biden adviser supplied by Tapper.

The dispute over the book’s reporting is the latest pushback from Biden aides and allies against what they are keen to depict as a slapdash fact-checking process by Tapper and Thompson.

Tapper and Thompson have made a point of publicly noting that they paid for their book to be fact-checked — a step that many nonfiction books skip — and that Fergus McIntosh, the head research editor at The New Yorker, led that process.

The New Yorker has a stringent and storied process for vetting materials before publication, and, indeed, McIntosh fact-checked both the book and the excerpt from the book that the magazine published last week. POLITICO has learned that McIntosh told at least one person that he was more limited in the facts he could check in the book versus the excerpt, which is common. McIntosh declined to speak on the record.

McIntosh’s role in fact-checking was raised as an issue in a statement Biden’s spokesperson gave The New Yorker, but which the magazine didn’t publish in its entirety. “[T]he New Yorker employee who reached out to fact-check this excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to the authors as they wrote it,” the statement read. “It's remarkable that neither this fact checker, nor the authors, reached out to fact check the actual book with us, and only the New Yorker is holding them to the high editorial standards that readers of the book should get in the first place.”

In other words, the unnamed Biden spokesperson claims that the first time a Biden aide heard from the independently hired fact-checker was for the magazine excerpt, not for the book. The New Yorker did not respond to a request for comment.

Rufus Gifford, a Biden campaign official, shared video of Biden talking with George Clooney at a moment that the president allegedly did not recognize him — though the video doesn’t seem to definitively prove Gifford’s argument.

Like some of the book’s buzziest anecdotes — including that Biden didn’t recognize Clooney — the town hall anecdote is a matter of perception.

Thompson reports that some people say ads from the town hall weren’t used because the lighting was bad; the lighting looks serviceable in the ads. Others told Thompson that Biden’s performance at the event was poor; Biden, indeed, sounds raspy and old.

In a statement to POLITICO, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson said: “Jake and Alex stand by their reporting in ‘Original Sin.’ The Biden team is repeating the same obfuscatory tactics used during their time in the White House, and news outlets continuing to rely on the very same unattributed and unverified voices raises serious credibility questions.”

The spokesperson didn’t want to be named. Tapper declined to identify his source who appraised the Biden town hall.

This story first appeared in POLITICO Playbook.

💾

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here's an offering of the best of this week's crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

Progressives are grappling with the killing of two people who worked at the Israeli embassy in Washington by a gunman who echoed a slogan that has become a rallying cry for many American liberals since the start of the war in Gaza.

After his arrest, the man suspected of killing the couple outside the Jewish Museum in Washington on Wednesday night exclaimed “free, free Palestine,” a phrase that has become ubiquitous at peaceful demonstrations and on social media over the past 18 months.

The attack brought renewed focus to a strain of violent radicalism on the left, even as progressives pointed out they share nothing with the gunman except his apparent support for Palestinian rights. What the attack did, they said, was hurt their cause.

“It betrays our values and hands more power to those already pushing authoritarian crackdowns,” said Layla Elabed, an organizer in Michigan and the leader of the Uncommitted National Movement, which arose in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s response to the Hamas attack launched on Oct. 7, 2023.

It’s also putting pressure on progressives to respond.

“Where’s our Martin Luther King today? I don't know where that individual is. Who is that individual?” said a progressive strategist granted anonymity to speak freely. “We just don’t have big moral leaders in our society, period, let alone on the political front.”

A fringe, more radical wing of the pro-Palestinian movement has blinked in and out of national attention since the onset of the war in Gaza. Thousands of protesters have been arrested, including dozens who forcibly entered and occupied university buildings. And last year, POLITICO reported that an online network of pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. included resources on how to “escalate” political actions beyond legal bounds, as well as pro-Hamas content.

Asked if members of the left are doing any soul searching, Kevin Rachlin — the Washington director of the Nexus Project, a left-leaning Jewish advocacy group — said, “I think they are.”

“This is more and more proof that we need to address antisemitism as a full society versus addressing [it] on the left or on the right,” Rachlin said.

Antisemitism historically and in recent years has more closely been associated with fringe groups on the alt-right, including most notably the 2017 “Unite the Right” neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia. President Donald Trump himself dined with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes at his Mar-a-Lago resort in 2022.

Supporters of the pro-Palestinian movement, including liberal lawmakers, found themselves on the defensive after the shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in a way that conservatives have had to respond to far-right violence in recent years.

Now, some pro-Palestinian activists worry the shooting, which federal authorities called a targeted act of antisemitism, could set back any progress they’ve made in their policy goals amid an increasingly dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and an expansion of Israel’s military operation in the decimated territory.

"We hope and caution against this vigilante violence being used to undermine the movement to end the genocide, a movement of hundreds of thousands of Americans calling for ceasefire and arms embargo,” said Sandra Tamari, executive director of the pro-Palestinian Adalah Justice Project.

Alex Pascal, a former Biden administration official who helped craft its strategy to combat antisemitism, said, “We cannot allow this violence to be weaponized by those who might exploit it to further degrade our democratic rights and freedoms.”

Trump and Republicans for years have cast the pro-Palestinian movement as a group of radical terrorist sympathizers. As the Trump administration has taken increasingly severe steps to suppress the movement and punish its leaders, Democrats and advocates have pushed back on that characterization, framing Republicans’ actions as an attack on free speech.

Pro-Palestinian lawmakers rushed Thursday to condemn the murders and call them acts of antisemitism. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he was “appalled” by the “heinous act.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) emphasized, “Absolutely nothing justifies the murder of innocents.”

Republicans were quick to paint the attacks as just part of broader extremism in the movement.

“The Palestinian cause is an evil one,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) said Thursday on “Fox & Friends.” “The only end of the conflict is total surrender by those who support Muslim terror.”

As details about the attack emerged late Wednesday night, the Trump administration jumped into offense. Attorney General Pam Bondi and D.C.’s newly tapped interim U.S. attorney, Jeanine Pirro, visited the scene. And on Truth Social just after midnight, Trump wrote: “These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW! Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.!”

The left has had to walk this line before. Earlier this year, when federal immigration agents detained and moved to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian green card holder and leader in last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, the Trump administration justified the arrest by claiming Khalil was a supporter of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

Democrats have largely united around detained pro-Palestinian activists as victims of the Trump administration whose constitutionally protected political speech is under attack — but also hedged their statements by emphasizing they didn’t endorse Khalil’s opinions on the subject.

“I abhor many of the opinions and policies that Mahmoud Khalil holds and supports,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said at the time on X. But, he added: “If the administration cannot prove he has violated any criminal law to justify taking this severe action and is doing it for the opinions he has expressed, then that is wrong.”

Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.

© AP

Elon Musk’s pledge to step back from campaign spending — if he means it — is rippling across the nation’s political landscape.

Some Republicans are worried that they might be losing their whale. Some Democrats fear they are losing their foil.

It matters because Musk injected an unprecedented level of spending into the presidential race and could do the same in November’s Virginia governor’s race and around the country in the midterms.

That was suddenly put in doubt Tuesday, when the Tesla CEO told an interviewer that he’s backing away from political spending after shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to help Donald Trump win the presidency last year.

“Taking his toys and going home,” said Steve Bannon, a Trump ally who has verbally sparred with Musk.

Musk, the world’s richest man with a net worth estimated at more than $420 billion, announced that he will “do a lot less” political spending, a surprise reversal of his promise to continue to play a major role influencing U.S. elections. It’s a significant turnaround from the days after Trump’s win in November, when Musk posted on social media that he would “keep grinding” away at election funding and “play a significant role in primaries.”

Musk’s group, America PAC, spent nearly $20 million aiming to boost Republicans in swing House districts. He also joined Trump regularly on the campaign trail last year and offered cash giveaways — including $1 million prizes to a few voters. He eventually spent more than $260 million on the 2024 election cycle and even contributed to two Florida special elections this year.

But Musk’s political capital seems to have faded after he and groups he backed — America PAC and Building America’s Future — contributed more than $19 million to support Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, a Republican who lost by 10 percentage points. The public face of the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive overhaul of the federal workforce, Musk earned the ire of many Americans. His car company Tesla faced financial headwinds, and Musk said he’d refocus his efforts on the flailing company along with his other businesses.

In Virginia, Republicans were expecting Musk would want to make his mark, given that’s where the most competitive statewide races are taking place this year. Some are still holding out hope that will happen: GOP gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears faces a major cash disadvantage against Democrat Abigail Spanberger.

Whether or not Musk actually stops contributing is still an open question. Asked about Musk’s decision to withdraw as a GOP donor, one Virginia Republican, granted anonymity to speak freely, said: “Eh, we’ll see.”

In Pennsylvania this year, Republicans and Democrats are gearing up for Supreme Court races, where three justices are up for retention in November. It could bring a repeat of the Wisconsin election: Democrats and Republicans started discussing whether Musk would play a role in the races, withthe Philadelphia Inquirer reporting that one Democratic candidate, Justices Kevin Dougherty, warned that “Elon Musk has already invested $1 million,” though that couldn't be verified yet through campaign reports.

Democrats especially don’t expect the tech billionaire to fully withdraw from political spending, and they expect him to funnel contributions legally through non-public, dark money means.

"I believe he will start moving his money in the background, through nonprofits," said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge, a major Democratic super PAC. "It'll be a lot more of that now."

Dennis also argued that Musk stepping away publicly may help Democrats narrow their focus back on congressional Republicans for cutting federal programs and that Musk had initially served as a "shield" for them when he was the de facto head of DOGE.

A spokesperson for America PAC declined to comment on what Musk’s announcement meant for the group.

Even some Republicans are unsure exactly what Musk’s announcement will mean for the future.

“I believe he means it right now. But every election is unique,” said Republican consultant Josh Novotney. “So he may be motivated to be active again in the future.”

Even if Musk greatly reduces his amount of campaign spending, several lawmakers on Wednesday said they appreciated what Musk had done for the party.

Sen. Ted Cruz said Musk made “an extraordinary difference in the 2024 race.” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) said he texted Musk Tuesday to say how thankful he was for what he’d done.

“He's worked hard. He wasn't involved in politics and he jumped all in because he saw an opportunity to make a change,” Mullin said. “Now he's going back to his life. I don't blame him. In fact, I commend him.”

Elena Schneider and Jessica Piper contributed to this story.

© Jose Luis Magana/AP

Twenty-four hours after the Sunday announcement that former President Joe Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, one of his staunchest supporters, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, said Monday he had yet to connect with him. Another close Hill ally, Sen. Chris Coons, had not spoken with his fellow Delawarean as of midafternoon Tuesday.

Biden’s longtime friend Bob Brady, the former House member from Pennsylvania who has known Biden for decades, said as of Tuesday afternoon that he hadn’t talked with the former president directly since his cancer diagnosis, though he did touch base Monday with his family. All three said they planned to speak with him soon.

Before his cancer diagnosis, Biden had been taking the train from Delaware to Washington, meeting with his post-presidential staff, allies and former Cabinet secretaries, according to a Biden aide granted anonymity to speak freely. In New York City for his appearance on "The View," he met with former President Bill Clinton. And last week he met with Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a rising star in the party.

But Biden, an inveterate creature of Washington who for most of his career seemed to gain life from glad-handing and working a room, hasn't yet talked to some longtime allies on Capitol Hill in the wake of his diagnosis. Months removed from his presidency, Biden has receded as a fixture of official Washington and has instead become a focal point of his party’s recriminations — his planned reemergence after departing the White House running headlong into a devastating health diagnosis and an unsettled party growing increasingly anxious in the wilderness.

Some Democrats said they are drafting notes or plan to speak with him. Coons said he was working on finding a time to connect with Biden. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware said she has reached out to people ”very close” to the family “and just shared my love, my prayers.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle wished him well.

Most Democrats are trying, yet again, to pivot from Biden’s health to stay on message as the GOP advances President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.

Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, the only former Biden White House aide who now serves in Congress, faulted Biden’s critics for capitalizing on what he called the “politics of the moment.”

“It's in their interest to talk about this rather than the issues of the day, so we're stuck in that unfortunate reality," Amo said. "I hope that people are focused on one, a legacy of public service, and two, wishing him well in his recovery.”

Or as Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, a Biden reelection co-chair, put it, “We are living through a historic, terrifying backsliding of our democracy … I am so profoundly uninterested in talking about this issue.”

Not everyone wants to change the subject. Some Democrats, perhaps feeling burned by how Biden’s decline was kept out of public view, are asking pointed questions about his cancer diagnosis — both publicly and privately.

On Monday, Ezekiel Emanuel, the oncologist and Biden’s former pandemic adviser, opened the door on MSNBC’s Biden-friendly “Morning Joe” to a round of questions about Biden’s health when he said that Biden “did not develop [cancer] in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.”

At best for Democrats, his remarks scanned to some observers as concern about the care the president received while in office. At worst, they fueled more accusations of a White House cover-up.

In a Monday interview, Emanuel said he could not rule out the possibility that Biden had been diagnosed earlier but that information somehow wasn’t released.

“Look, I’m not his doctor,” Emanuel said. “I can't rule out that possibility because I don't know what transpired there.”

A spokesperson for Biden said Tuesday the former president’s “last known” prostate-specific antigen cancer screening test was in 2014 and that “prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer.”

This isn't the first time Biden has faced health challenges. When he was running for vice president in 2008, Biden disclosed that he had an enlarged prostate and a biopsy but that no evidence of cancer was found. His medical records also showed he had undergone prostate-specific antigen tests, which yielded normal results.

More than a decade later, when he was campaigning for the White House in 2019, Biden revealed he had been treated for his enlarged prostate, first with medication and later with surgery. The files stated he “never had prostate cancer.”

Trump seized on questions surrounding the timeline of diagnosis — something that had quickly become an obsession of Biden's right-wing detractors online — telling reporters he was “surprised that it wasn't, you know, the public wasn't notified a long time ago because to get to stage 9, that's a long time.” (Biden's diagnosis is stage-four prostate cancer.) Vice President JD Vance said he blamed the “people around” Biden. 

Asked about new allegations of a conspiracy to keep Biden’s illness secret, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said of Republicans advancing the idea, “What a soulless bunch. Anybody who's spending time doing that, I'll pray for him in mass this Sunday.”

To some allies of Biden, who relied on a small and, critics said, insular circle of advisers during his presidency, even acknowledging such questions is fraught.

“This just feeds into the conspiracy theories. You have an electorate who doesn’t pay attention, and this is breaking through,” said Democratic strategist Kellan White, who worked as a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign in Pennsylvania in 2024. “All a Gen Z voter who barely pays attention is hearing is, ‘They weekend-at-Bernie-ed Joe Biden who now has cancer, which he probably had for 10 years.’”

Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who’s long been close to the Bidens, said in a brief interview she’d sent a message to the former president through his team and “and expressed that I was praying for him and reiterated that he's in the hearts of every Delawarean right now.”

She said she’d spoken to him last at a St. Patrick’s Day event in Wilmington and “he seemed in good spirits. He seemed healthy.”

Biden’s diagnosis came just as some of the Democratic Party’s brightest stars had begun to grapple with questions about ramifications of his decision to run for reelection — and the fallout for the party.

“The historians will have to sort out the politics of the whole thing,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who weathered his own cancer diagnosis, said in an interview.

He added that he had not spoken to Biden but was drafting him a note. He said, “But at this point, there's nothing to do, but for those of us who love the guy, to express our solidarity and our sympathy.”

© Nam Y. Huh/AP

The largest Democratic fundraising platform has found itself in President Donald Trump’s crosshairs. And its CEO is coming out against the “authoritarian” tactic — while acknowledging ActBlue needs to “build some new muscles” to fight back.

Trump signed a presidential memorandum last month ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate the use of online fundraising by foreign actors to make so-called straw donations influencing American elections. ActBlue, by far the largest online fundraising platform for Democrats, was the only one named in the memo.

"We almost were in a, ‘This can't be real, this can't be serious. These are not serious people, these are not serious allegations,’” Regina Wallace-Jones, ActBlue’s CEO, said in an interview with POLITICO. “And instead held on for a very long time to our traditional posture."

That posture was to stay out of the spotlight even as the platform has faced increased scrutiny, and accusations of fraud, from Republicans for years. House Republicans have been investigating ActBlue over a range of fundraising practices since 2023, and that probe remains ongoing. An interim report released by the committee weeks before Trump’s memorandum accused ActBlue of allowing donation fraud, though its only examples of attempted fraud were those identified by the company itself in internal documents.

Now ActBlue has realized it can no longer keep a low profile. Wallace-Jones, who took the helm at ActBlue in early 2023, appeared on MSNBC in April when the Trump memorandum first came out, and has made the media rounds in recent weeks, doing interviews with Pod Save America and activist Aaron Parnas. And she told POLITICO that — while she’s confident investigations into ActBlue will lead “nowhere” — she now sees the need to tell the public more about what ActBlue actually does. That new stance puts the fundraising platform in rarefied company — one of the few progressive forces fighting against administration policies instead of acquiescing to its demands.

“It's only now that we are taking the position that our silence is actually hurting the perception of who we really are,” Wallace-Jones said. “And so could we have been more vocal sooner? Sure.”

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was your reaction to the president’s memorandum?

This is something that was not expected. But it was also unsurprising in the sense that there has been a slow crescendo from grassroots individuals all the way up through various legislative bodies, on the Republican side to look at ActBlue.

We are an organization that wants to do fundraising right. It's a first principle of ours, and we are always interested in things that can make us even better.

The targeting of ActBlue is deeply political in nature. It is clearly not oriented toward cleaning up fundraising in general, but specifically targeted toward the largest and most successful fundraising organization in the Democratic space, and I see that for what it is. It is an attack on the power of the grassroots. It is an acknowledgement that we do this better.

I don't see it at all as a way to improve anything, but rather to exercise an authoritarian tactic to try to push out opposing voices. And we are not in a world where that would ever be OK for us.

In hindsight, now that it's gotten to this point, do you feel like there's anything ActBlue could have done or should have done over the past few years that could have addressed these lines of attack?

Listen, we have always seen ourselves as such a good actor in this space. And because of that, I think that we almost were in a, ‘This can't be real, this can't be serious. These are not serious people, these are not serious allegations.’ And instead held on for a very long time to our traditional posture, which is to be background plumbing.

It's only now that we are taking the position that our silence is actually hurting the perception of who we really are. And so could we have been more vocal sooner? Sure. It took us a bit of time to actually embrace the idea that this is just a political attack, and in response to that, to build some new muscles.

That's what we're doing right now, and that's what we will continue to do until this navigates exactly to the place that it should have been to begin with, which is nowhere.

We've seen, obviously, over the last five to 10 years that political attacks can sometimes still have consequences. I'm curious if you've heard from organizations or campaigns that use ActBlue if they've been concerned about where all this could lead, and what is your message to them?

Bad faith attacks have real consequences for real people. And part of that for ActBlue is that it has spawned a heightened sense of need to secure ourselves from the danger of those who hear these bad faith attacks and believe that they are cleansing the ecosystem by taking negative actions on good actors.

This has created a really profound conviction on our part to offer that reassurance.

Our position is we have nothing to hide. And we stand by that every day, which is why we are so transparent in the way that we operate, the way that we engage, the way that we respond.

You've talked about being more vocal. Is there anything else ActBlue needs to do to ensure it remains a trusted platform in light of these attacks?

Listen, there are things that we have always done and, again, we don't super publicize the actions that we're taking.

Being more vocal about how we do that is clearly what is needed in this moment and the posture that we will take going forward just to make sure that in the presence of truly bad actors that thing that we have worked so hard to preserve stays intact.

On the issue of trust, last cycle we saw for the first time ActBlue kicked off some “scam PACs” from the platform. Could you talk about that decision to decide certain actors shouldn't be raising on ActBlue, and whether that is something going forward that ActBlue is going to continue to focus on?

I'm very reticent to use the word “scam PACs” because it doesn't have a formal definition. There are issues that come along with any entity, being a long-standing entity versus a brand new entity.

So for example, a PAC that's been around for many years has a lot of historical information that we can look at to see, are their fundraising practices good? Do they actually have a virtual presence that we can look at? Can we study their budget and decide that the dollars that they are deploying are dollars that are in line with what they said they're here to exist to do? Or are they spending dollars raised on the backs of hardworking small dollar donors to elevate themselves?

These are things that you can learn pretty quickly from an entity that has existed for a long time, and new entities don't have the benefit of that historical information, so in some ways you have to learn as they go and make decisions as they grow about how they're behaving.

We've seen in recent years, there are other platforms that have emerged as means of Democratic giving. When you look at the landscape, is there anything ActBlue can learn from emerging competitors or any ways you've thought about changes ActBlue might need to make to keep up with the landscape and the competition?

We've adopted a phrase recently that is, “When they go low, we innovate.” And this is something that is important not just for ActBlue but for any technology organization.

The good thing about being the largest is that there are many benefits that come with being the largest. There's economies of scale that we gain, there are network effects that we gain and — you asked the question about other smaller competitors — these are not things that you gain overnight, right?

There are always things that we can learn from smaller organizations that in some ways might be more nimble. They have lower risk. They have fewer customers that they have to notify when changes are coming forward. They have a smaller platform to make sure that the things that they're implementing actually work.

We've got a huge network and we've got many, many more constituents that we have to work with. Organizations like that, who reach the position of large scale, do two things: One, they force themselves to evolve eternally, but two, they also look at opportunities to bring in through acquisitions some of those new ideas so that they can grow more quickly.

© Francis Chung/POLITICO

Joe Biden hadn’t received a commonly used blood test to check for prostate cancer for more than a decade before his recent diagnosis, the former president’s office said Tuesday amid questions about his health while in the White House.

Biden last received a prostate-specific antigen test to screen for prostate cancer in 2014, according to a brief statement.

“Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer,” it said.

The statement came as President Donald Trump and his allies have challenged the timing of the diagnosis, which came as Biden faced questions about his health with the release of a book asserting that aides worked to hide his physical and mental decline while in office.

The announcement that the former president has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, with metastasis to the bone, has shaken Washington as many Democrats grapple with reports of his declining health during his final two years in the White House — and the implications for the 2024 campaign.

Even some allies have questioned how Biden’s doctors failed to spot such a serious condition, even as his annual physicals attracted close scrutiny as president.

Trump seized on the confusion Monday, telling reporters Biden’s cancer should have been flagged earlier and then attacking the former president’s mental acuity.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that men over the age of 70 refrain from routine screening for prostate cancer. The former president was in his early 70s in 2014, in the middle of serving a second term as President Barack Obama’s vice president.

💾

© Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

A longtime friend of Joe Biden said the family told him Monday the former president would be "OK" after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

“I talked to the family. He’s doing good,” said former Rep. Bob Brady (D-Pa.), who has known Biden for decades but has not spoken to the former president directly since the news. “They’re not overly concerned. They think this could all be treated and he should be OK.”

Brady said Biden’s family said “everything looks good” and “they’re figuring out what to do, how they're gonna treat it, and from what I hear and what they're saying and what I understand, it’s very treatable, which is great.” He acknowledged that the cancer is “maybe a little aggressive,” but “it doesn’t matter — he’s gonna treat it and he’s gonna be fine.”

Brady did not say which family member or members spoke with him, and an aide didn't elaborate. A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment.

Biden’s office announced over the weekend that the former president was diagnosed on Friday with prostate cancer with metastasis to the bone. His team said that it is “a more aggressive form of the disease” but that the cancer “appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.”

Still, a stage-four prostate cancer diagnosis is serious. Dr. Chris George, a medical director of the cancer program at the Northwestern Health Network, told Reuters that prostate cancer cannot be cured once it reaches the bone, though it can be treated. But, he said, Biden could live for years with effective treatment.

The announcement of Biden’s diagnosis came amid widespread recriminations within the Democratic Party about Biden’s physical and mental condition during his presidency and before he dropped out of the presidential campaign last year. It also coincided with the release of a book on Tuesday arguing that an inner circle kept a diminished Biden shielded from the public. And just last week Axios posted audio clips of Biden’s interview with then-special counsel Robert Hur, in which he struggled to recall key dates.

Brady, 80, and Biden, 82, have been friends for more than 30 years, and their home bases are less than an hour apart. Brady said in 2024 that he talked to Biden almost every week, often about Corvettes. Brady has long called Biden “our senator, even though he’s from Delaware.” After the 2024 election, Brady slammed former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign and said Biden would have performed better than her if he’d stayed in the presidential race.

Brady, chair of the Philadelphia Democratic Party, said Biden’s family told him the president would call him after primary elections in his state on Tuesday.

“I call him ‘the boss.’ They said the boss will call you after the election,” he said.

He added of Biden: “I love him to death,” remarking that he “didn’t want to bother me” before the primary.

© AP

Elon Musk said he plans to cut back on political spending, saying he has “done enough,” a move that coincides with the billionaire entrepreneur taking a step back from President Donald Trump’s Washington.

Speaking at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday, the Tesla CEO said he would “do a lot less” political spending “in the future,” adding: “I think I've done enough.”

Musk brushed aside a question about whether his move was a response to pushback he has received for his prominent role in reshaping the federal government, marked by his leadership of the agency-slashing Department of Government Efficiency.

“If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. I don't currently see a reason,” he said.

Musk, who poured over $290 million of his own money into the 2024 election to support Trump and Republicans, had established himself as a major political force, both domestically and abroad.

At home, he has sought to influence state elections, including a key Wisconsin Supreme Court race last month. His political operation spent significantly on the contest, which turned into a referendum on Musk’s popularity as he became the face of the Republican campaign.

But his efforts failed as the Democratic-backed candidate easily secured victory, marking a turning point for Musk’s political involvement.

The billionaire also came under fire for repeatedly attempting to influence various European elections at the end of last year, including throwing his weight behind Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party, a move that drew significant backlash in the country.

The Wisconsin blow also came amid heightened backlash against Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to downsizing the federal government under DOGE, which has elicited anger from across the political spectrum.

Dissatisfaction with Musk has bubbled over among Americans, with the adviser receiving only 41 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval of his work with DOGE in polling released last month.

While anti-Musk protesters took out their rage against his government cuts on Tesla cars and showrooms across the country, Republican lawmakers faced waves of angry backlash from constituents during town halls in their home states, prompting the chair of the House GOP’s campaign arm to call for a halt to the open forums at the time.

As the brewing anti-Musk storm grew, Democrats seized on the billionaire’s government influence project to rally their base — a strategy that proved successful in Wisconsin.

The once-ubiquitous adviser to the president has since played a less public-facing role in the Republican Party. He’s been less visible in Oval Office appearances and Cabinet meetings with Trump, which had become a hallmark of the early days of his presidency.

The president and his top advisers have also gone silent on Musk on their social media platforms in recent weeks, a marked shift away from the stream of praise they once had for the billionaire.

As Musk has faded into the background, so too have his DOGE efforts. While the aggressive federal slashing project dominated airwaves at the outset of Trump’s presidency, it has more recently taken a backseat to other controversial issues under the administration, including Trump’s mass deportation policy and tariff scheme.

Musk, too, has had some notable public breaks with the president. The Tesla CEO, who lost billions after Trump announced his sweeping tariff plan last month, came out swinging against White House trade adviser and key supporter of the president’s tariff policy, Peter Navarro, blasting him as a “moron” in an unusually public show of dissent.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt downplayed the quarrel at the time, saying “boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue.”

Musk’s decision to tone down his political involvement could throw a wrench in Democrats’ plans to continue using the billionaire as a political target, as they appear poised to lose the figure they have portrayed as Washington’s chief villain. But it could also leave a major hole in Republican campaigns’ funds if he does actually slow down spending.

Tuesday's comments are not the first time Musk has made sweeping pronouncements about his intentions not to involve himself in politics.

He said in March 2024 that he wouldn't be "donating money to either candidate" in the presidential election. By December 2024, Musk had endorsed Trump and thrown hundreds of million into the election, setting up his meteoric rise as the president's right hand man.

And Washington hasn’t seen the end of Musk quite yet. He said during his Tuesday speech that he plans to have dinner with Trump on Wednesday, signaling that he hasn’t entirely lost the president’s ear.

© Evan Vucci/AP

Elon Musk and Donald Trump were the main characters on the internet and across Washington day after day. Then the world’s richest man started to fade away.

On Truth Social, where Trump is known for sharing his unfiltered thoughts, the president used to mention Musk every few days but now has not posted about him in more than a month. Trump’s fundraising operation has largely ceased sending emails that name-check the Tesla CEO. The billionaire’s name, once a staple of White House briefings, now hardly gets mentioned at all. Even members of Congress have essentially dropped him from their newsletters.

It’s a remarkable change for the man who was seemingly everywhere in the early days of the second Trump administration. Musk was in the Oval Office, in Cabinet meetings and on Air Force One. He was at inauguration, then in the House gallery for Trump’s first address to Congress, where Trump praised his hard work. He posed with the president and a row of Teslas on the White House lawn.

But Musk’s highly visible presence in Washington has ended, a POLITICO analysis found. In Trump’s rapidly evolving second presidency, Musk’s monopoly on political discourse, news coverage and social media seems to have broken — driven in part by how Trump and Republicans have all but stopped talking about him.

“I miss him,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.).

Musk’s shrinking presence could have political benefits for the GOP. Public polling has revealed him to be increasingly unpopular — far more so than Trump. Early last month, Republicans also lost a major Wisconsin judicial race where Musk had become both a major funder and a campaign issue. And in Washington, the cost-slashing efforts of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have continued, but have taken a political back seat to tariffs and the budget fight.

Republicans still speak favorably of Musk when asked about him. And they of course want his massive wealth, army of supporters, and online influence machine backing them in future elections. But while Kennedy argued that Musk stepping back won’t “make any difference one way or the other” for the midterms, others are starting to say the best way for the tech CEO to help the party might not be on the campaign trail ahead of 2026.

“Those polls on favorability basically tell you Elon's doing a great job when he's on the inside,” said David McIntosh, CEO of the conservative Club for Growth. “And hopefully he stays a long time to do that, but doesn't take on this role of a campaign surrogate.”

That could complicate Democrats’ efforts to use Musk as a political foil. They’ve spent months honing strategies, including in the Wisconsin race, to tie the unpopular billionaire to their Republican opponents in battleground contests across the country.

But the Tesla CEO, who has an enormous following on his social media platform X, is unlikely to completely disappear — and Democrats say they can still use him as a boogeyman. Musk has become such a potent villain on the left that Democrats still expect to invoke him ahead of competitive elections this year in Virginia and New Jersey, as well as in next year’s midterms. And while Republicans are less inclined to put him at the forefront, they’re also not fully backing away from him.

“Ultimately, the issue here was never about Elon Musk, it was about Elon Musk-ism,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “He wrote their playbook, and it’s not about theoretical blame, it’s about real-world damage that he and Trump have caused that will be litigated all through the midterms.”

The Trump administration’s shift away from Musk has been dramatic online. In February and March, Trump posted about the Tesla CEO an average of roughly four times per week; since the beginning of April, the president hasn’t mentioned Musk once on Truth Social.

Asked about Trump’s declining mentions of Musk, and whether the tech CEO was a political liability, the White House didn’t mention Musk directly.

“The mission of DOGE — to cut waste, fraud, and abuse — will surely continue. DOGE employees who onboarded at their respective agencies will continue to work with President Trump’s cabinet to make our government more efficient,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

It’s not just Trump. The president’s top advisers, as well as official White House accounts, have also largely stopped posting photos and content that mentions Musk.

Trump is also no longer using Musk’s name to bring in money. In February, his fundraising operation invoked Musk in emails to online supporters on a near-daily basis — a sign that the Tesla CEO was red meat for drumming up donations with the Trump-loving online base. (“I love Elon Musk! The media wants to drive us apart, and it’s not working. He’s great,” read part of one fundraising message, sent Feb. 27.)

But mentions of Musk in fundraising appeals abruptly stopped in early March. Since then, Trump has sent only one fundraising message mentioning Musk — a May email touting a “Gulf of America” hat that the Tesla CEO tried on.

As Musk’s role in the White House has publicly faded, he’s generating less Google search traffic and getting mentioned in the news less. It’s a far cry from the attention he was receiving as a central political figure on the campaign trail and then as the head of the Trump administration’s efforts to slash the federal government.

Some Republicans have come to see Musk as politically toxic, which Democrats have been trying to leverage. First, there’s the polling: voters tend to view Musk far less favorably than Trump. Compared to a few months ago, the Tesla CEO’s approval rating has dropped across most groups, including independents and voters without college degrees.

Polling from Navigator Research earlier this spring found that DOGE’s work becomes less popular when tied to Musk, and polling from Data for Progress in late April found most voters wanted Musk out of government at the end of his 130-day period as a special employee that’s set to expire at the end of in May — or even sooner.

“The public supported the effort to end wasteful Washington spending, but they did not support the way that it was done,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “His mission to cut the waste from Washington was certainly helpful, but the language he used wasn’t.”

Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.V.), a top Trump ally, said Musk is a “patriot” and that “he’s really trying to give up his time and do a lot of good.” But he acknowledged that the DOGE chief has ruffled feathers.

“We got too close to the fence. We mowed too far,” he said. “We just adjust. That’s the process that’s going on.”

In Wisconsin, Democrats put Musk at the forefront of the state Supreme Court election in April, aided by the fact that the Tesla CEO was a major donor backing the conservative candidate and showed up to campaign in the state. The race became a referendum on not just the broader Trump administration but on Musk specifically. And Judge Susan Crawford — the liberal candidate who ran an ad accusing Musk of trying to “buy” a seat on the court — won by 10 points in a state Trump had narrowly carried last November.

"He’s finished, done, gone. He polls terrible. People hate him,” said a GOP operative who was granted anonymity to speak frankly. “He'd go to Wisconsin thinking he can buy people's votes, wear the cheese hat, act like a 9-year-old. ... It doesn't work. It's offensive to people."

In addition to potential political concerns, part of Musk’s shift out of the spotlight reflects the rapidly changing issue priorities over the early months of Trump’s presidency. In the first few months, DOGE’s cuts were top of mind. And while those efforts continue, they have also given up some of the spotlight to other Trump initiatives, including his market-rocking tariffs and controversial deportations.

So while Musk’s public profile has declined, that does not mean he lacks access or influence. Just last week, he was among the tech CEOs to join Trump in Saudi Arabia, shaking hands with the nation’s leaders and speaking at an investment forum.

And DOGE’s aggressive cost-cutting efforts, led by a staff Musk brought in, are expected to continue even after he formally leaves his role as a special government employee. Both Republicans and Democrats also widely expect the tech billionaire, who poured $290 million of his own money into the 2024 elections, to continue to be a major political player.

That’s one reason why Democrats say they aren’t fretting. Musk remains a foil for Democrats to highlight, but in the context of Trump and Republicans who have enabled him, said CJ Warnke, spokesperson for House Majority PAC, Democrats’ super PAC for congressional races. The issues that have replaced Musk as a dominating issue in news, such as potential Medicaid cuts and tariffs, are still good for Democrats to run on, he said.

In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, several ads backing Crawford focused primarily or entirely on Musk, and for a while Democrats would sometimes mention Musk — but not Trump — on social media and in statements.

The Tesla CEO is still being regularly name-dropped in Democratic congressional candidates’ announcements from Pennsylvania to Illinois and California, in both safe and swing districts. And of the six Democrats running in New Jersey’s June 10 gubernatorial primary, four have named Musk in TV ads.

But recent ads tend to avoid making Musk the main villain. As ads blanket New Jersey in the final weeks of the race, the spots mentioning Musk usually put him side by side with Trump. A few give him glancing mentions or a quick flash on screen — not the main character.

💾

© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, with metastasis to the bone, according to a statement from his personal office Sunday.

Doctors diagnosed Biden last week with a prostate nodule after he experienced increasing urinary symptoms. By Friday, they diagnosed him with cancer.

Biden’s office said the cancer “appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.”

A spokesperson said in a statement that the 82-year-old Biden and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.

Biden’s news seemed to, for a short time at least, break through Washington’s current fierce divides. Among those quickly offering support was his immediate predecessor and successor in the White House.

“Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis,” said President Donald Trump on Truth Social, his social media platform. “We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”

The diagnosis' revelation came as Democrats were publicly grappling with new questions about Biden’s mental acuity throughout the last two years of his presidency, which culminated in a disastrous debate performance and his decision to drop out of the 2024 campaign.

David Axelrod, the longtime Democratic operative and former Barack Obama adviser, said on CNN minutes after the diagnosis was revealed that conversations about Biden's mental acuity "should be more muted and set aside for now as he's struggling through this."

Biden’s aides have been bracing for the Tuesday release of a new book: “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” chronicling what the authors describe as  a White House campaign to cover up Biden’s deteriorating condition while in office.

On Friday, audio clips of the former president’s interview with then-Special Counsel Robert Hur — in which Biden occasionally paused for long periods of time and struggled to remember dates — were published by the news site Axios. One of the dates he struggled to recall was that of his son Beau Biden’s death. Beau Biden, the former Delaware attorney general, died in 2015 of brain cancer.

TJ Ducklo, a former Biden staffer who has also battled cancer, offered an optimistic message of support on Sunday.

“No one in America is stronger than Joe Biden,” Ducklo wrote on X. Mine metastasized to the bones too. Cancer has no fucking idea who it’s dealing with. Betting against Biden has never been and still remains a bad f***ing bet.”

Lisa Kashinsky contributed to this report.

© Nam Y. Huh/AP

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has suspended his campaign for governor, clearing the field in the Republican primary for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Yost told supporters Friday that he chose to end his campaign after concluding that his fight to win the Republican nomination had gone from a “steep climb” to a “vertical cliff” after the state party chose to support Ramaswamy.

“I do not wish to divide my political party or my state with a quixotic battle over the small differences between my vision and that of my opponent,” Yost wrote in his message. “I am simply not that important.”

Yost’s step back from the race comes just one week after the Ohio Republican Party voted to back Ramaswamy as their candidate for governor. Following that announcement, the attorney general’s campaign team released a statement indicating he would decide after consulting with supporters.

His decision leaves Ramaswamy — the biotech entrepreneur turned presidential hopeful in 2024 — as the lone candidate in the Republican primary.

Ramaswamy had been a strong contender in the race even before the Ohio GOP’s support and Yost’s exit after securing an endorsement from President Donald Trump.

But the nomination isn’t sealed for Ramaswamy just yet. The Republican primary is almost a year away, and he could face a challenge from Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel.

The lieutenant governor — a famed Ohio State football coach — has confirmed he’s considering entering the race, and he has a powerful ally in termed-out Gov. Mike DeWine, who elevated Tressel to lieutenant governor in February.

Yost will remain as attorney general through January 2027, and he left the door open for another political run in the future.

“I will continue to fight for Ohio and Ohioans during that time—and I suspect that this is not my final chapter,” Yost said.

💾

© Justin Merriman/Getty Images

Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here's an offering of the best of this week's crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.

Democrats thought they were done with Joe Biden. Now, new revelations about his mental and physical decline while in office are putting a harsh spotlight back on him — and Democrats’ failings last year — at a critical moment in the party’s attempts to move on.

On the Hill, Democrats rallying against the GOP megabill that could slash Medicaid benefits and enact sweeping tax cuts instead ran into blaring headlines this week about Biden’s deteriorating condition and doomed campaign.

“It’s a discussion that was overdue. I don’t know if it’s helpful, but it’s unavoidable,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), the 78-year-old who called for Biden to step aside from the ticket last year.

In interviews with more than two dozen other Democrats on Capitol Hill, lawmakers met questions about Biden’s campaign failings and mental lapses with heavy sighs and topical pivots. Many talked about "looking forward" — to combating President Donald Trump, to retaking control of Congress — in a sign of how awkward and potentially damaging the recriminations about Biden have become.

Many in the party had treated Biden with kid gloves in the aftermath of Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump, with lawmakers publicly and privately lauding Harris’ effort and eliding Biden’s drag on the ticket.

Now, most in the party are desperate to talk about anything else.

“Our energy needs to be in our priorities to be looking forward, not backwards,” said Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.). “This relitigation is backwards looking, and that's not very helpful to us.”

Top Democratic congressional leaders also shrugged off Biden when confronted this week with the latest divulgences about his mental and physical acuity — and whether they helped cover them up.

“We’re not looking backward, we’re looking forward at this moment in time,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a Tuesday press conference. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed him hours later: “We’re just looking forward.”

A Biden spokesperson declined to comment.

But the party's problems aren't going away with Biden. All week, while contending with news coverage and a forthcoming book about the past president, the party was also confronting turmoil at the Democratic National Committee over a DNC official’s effort to challenge “asleep at the wheel” Democrats. House Democrats raced to shut down a rogue Trump impeachment effort by Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.). And there was a spate of negative press about one of the party’s own senators, John Fetterman.

Some Democrats welcomed the renewed conversations about Biden, worried their party has yet to fully reckon with last year’s electoral shellacking. It has been a point of tension in the party since last year, flaring up for some House members at the White House Christmas party. One Democratic lawmaker approached Harris in the photo line to tell her “we love you,” according to a person familiar with the interaction and granted anonymity to speak freely. When the lawmaker got to Biden, the then-president asked, “Well, do you love me, too?”

Even today, there are Democrats who think the party should be doing more to learn from their mistakes in 2024.

“Joe Biden clearly just was not capable of delivering the message we needed to deliver in 2024,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) “Why did it take so long? Why was it so hard to recognize that and make the change? So I guess to some degree it is helpful to have that conversation.”

“It’s OK for us to come to grips with our failures so that we can make the changes necessary to win. And while I am very much focused on the future, I'm concerned that there's still a lot of denial in our party about how badly we've lost,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), who was one of the first Democrats to call for Biden to step aside last summer.

He added: “Some of the same people who just want to move on are the same people who are basically in denial that we lost.”

Others like Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) acknowledged that the former president clearly lost a step, but didn’t believe it was a death knell to the party’s prospects of winning future elections.

“Look, most Democrats … had no idea that Biden had lost some of it — not all of it — but he lost some of it. It's one of those things that happens in all aspects of life. You don't want it to happen at that level, but it does,” Cleaver said. “I think some people in the White House who were trying to be helpful, didn't talk to the right people who … could have addressed it a little better. But it's not like that's going to destroy the Democratic Party.”

But their views are far from the prevailing ones. Instead, on Capitol Hill, Democrats were rushing to shift the public’s focus to the House GOP’s megabill — and a moment of unity for Democrats as they lined up in opposition to Trump’s domestic agenda. Ideological disagreements on taxes, immigration and entitlements have largely been paved over with the legislation giving Democrats plenty to oppose.

“We have more important things to talk about,” said Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) when asked questions about revelations about Biden’s mental acuity this week — a far cry from where she was some 10 months ago, when she joined an ever-growing caucus of Democrats calling for the then-president to leave the Democratic ticket.

Others saw this moment as another chance to take a dig at the GOP.

“There's nothing more unifying than watching Republicans try to rip [health care] away and absolutely destroy our economy," said Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.).

"So I think important conversations are being had about the values that unite us.”

Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

© Nam Y. Huh/AP

Rahm Emanuel leaned into speculation about a 2028 presidential run on Wednesday.

After hosts of ABC’s “The View” told him he sounded like a presidential contender, the former two-term Chicago mayor didn’t exactly deny it.

"I am in training — I don't know if I'll make the Olympics,” said Emanuel, who served in both former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s administrations.

Emanuel — a longtime critic of President Donald Trump — has said he wants to return to elected office and is said to have eyes on the presidency. But it's not just the Oval Office he's been linked to.

In recent months, Emanuel hasn’t ruled out runs for just about every top job in Illinois — including the governor’s mansion in 2026, Sen. Dick Durbin’s seat and Chicago mayor in 2027. But his recent remark suggests he may be zeroing in on the White House.

Leading up to the moment, Emanuel laid out what sounded like a campaign stump speech.

“The American dream is unaffordable. The American dream is inaccessible,” Emanuel said during the interview. “And that should be unacceptable to all of us … Everybody in this audience, they just want one thing — for their kids to have a shot and the problem is Washington has given them the shaft and that is wrong.”

He also took a swing at Trump’s recent decision to accept a swanky new jet from Qatar.

"The White House has a 'For Sale' sign on the front lawn — and everybody knows it," Emanuel said.

Emanuel’s resume is long: U.S. ambassador to Japan under Biden, Obama’s chief of staff, two-term mayor and congressman. His brash speaking style has drawn comparisons to Trump, though Emanuel’s politics are decidedly establishment Democrat.

💾

© Eugene Hoshiko/Getty Images

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said there's "no doubt" that former President Joe Biden suffered cognitive decline in office and that it would have been better for the party if he hadn’t run for reelection.

“There’s no doubt about it,” said the Connecticut senator when asked by POLITICO if Biden experienced cognitive decline as president. “The debate is whether it was enough that it compromised his ability to act as chief executive.”

Murphy, who is widely viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender, also said that it would have been helpful to Democrats if Biden had declined to mount a 2024 bid.

“I mean, isn’t that self-evident? We lost,” he quipped. “Obviously, in retrospect, we should have done something different. The likelihood is the odds were pretty stacked against us no matter what, but clearly people were looking for change and neither Biden nor Harris were going to be able to offer a real message of change.”

Few elected Democrats have so far been as direct about attacking Biden's cognitive abilities publicly. Former Transportation SecretaryPete Buttigieg said on Tuesday that "maybe" Democrats would have been better off had the former president not run for reelection, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said if he wasn't going to run he needed to drop out before the Democratic primary because the amount of time former Vice President Kamala Harris was left with was insufficient for her to "introduce herself" to the public.

Democrats have been confronted with questions about Biden's age as the former president has reemerged on the national stage, sitting down for an interview with "The View" last week and with a pair of high-profile journalists slated to release a book about what the authors describe as the former president’s deterioration while in office.

After Biden’s disastrous debate performance last year, Murphy defended him as “one of the most effective presidents that I have ever served under,” but said his performance “raised questions” and that he had to quickly do more on the campaign trail to address concerns. That February, prior to the debate, Murphy said that “I know that he is ready for this campaign” and pushed back against those who argued otherwise.

© Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

A top campaign aide to former Vice President Kamala Harris blames former President Joe Biden for Harris’ loss, saying “it’s all Biden” in a new book about the former commander in chief’s apparent deterioration during the 2024 race.

The perspective shared by David Plouffe, who worked on Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign, underscores a frustration held by some Democrats: that Biden’s reluctance to remove himself earlier from the White House race sealed the fate of Harris’ election bid.

Discussing the impact Biden’s withdrawal in July of last year had on Harris’ chances, Plouffe described the then-vice president’s less than three-month bid for the White House as a “fucking nightmare.”

“And it’s all Biden…He totally fucked us,” Plouffe, who was also manager of former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and a senior adviser in his White House, told the authors of the report.

First reported on by The Guardian and Axios, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” — a new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson — provides accounts from interviews with over 200 people about what the authors describe as the then-president’s physical and mental deterioration and the White House’s quiet campaign to conceal it. The book will be released May 20.

A spokesperson for Biden told POLITICO that the former president and his team have not reviewed the book and declined to comment on the excerpts.

The book goes on to detail how Plouffe would receive calls for donors concerned about Biden’s mental acuity and energy on the campaign trail. Plouffe said he tried to question the White House and Democratic Party about if they were confident Biden could win another election and was assured Biden was equipped to score a second term.

In a separate incident, according to an excerpt published in The New Yorker Tuesday, the former president reportedly didn’t recognize Academy Award winning actor and longtime acquaintanceGeorge Clooney at a fundraiser last June.

The two encountered each other after Biden’s arrival to the event in Los Angeles, which was organized by Clooney, Julia Roberts, and former Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg.

The former president was accompanied by an aide and allegedly took several tries before registering he was talking to Clooney.

Despite ongoing concerns from the public and other lawmakers about his physical condition and mental acuity, Biden, White House officials and his family members held firm on their stance that Biden could defeat President Donald Trump throughout the former president’s since-collapsed reelection campaign.

But Biden and his team reached a fork in the road after his poor debate performance last June against Trump, which immediately sparked calls from top Democrats for Biden to withdraw from the race. Biden stepped aside a few weeks after the televised event.

Biden recently held himself accountable for Trump’s win during an interview on “The View” last week.

“Look, I was in charge and he won, so I take responsibility,” he said.

💾

© Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A Democratic National Committee panel on Monday recommended a new election for the post held by Vice Chair David Hogg, whose effort to challenge "asleep at the wheel" Democrats sparked a firestorm in the national party.

While the panel’s move was based on a procedural complaint unrelated to the broader controversy surrounding Hogg, the committee is giving DNC members another option to squeeze the vice chair after he promised to spend $20 million in Democratic primaries against incumbent House members in safe blue districts.

Hogg and DNC chair Ken Martin have been dueling over Hogg’s plans. Most recently, Martin said Hogg should either sign a neutrality pledge or step down from his post.

On Monday, the DNC Credentials Committee committee heard a complaint that alleged the body bungled its own rules when Hogg and Malcolm Kenyatta were elected as vice chairs in February. To move forward, the full national body would have to sign off on the resolution the committee approved. If it does, it would call for a new election for the two vice chair posts in question and therefore would remove Hogg and Kenyatta from their posts.

In a statement, Hogg said it’s “impossible to ignore the broader context of my work to reform the party which loomed large over this vote.”

“The DNC has pledged to remove me, and this vote has provided an avenue to fast-track that effort,” Hogg said.

In a thread on X, Kenyatta said he is "pissed that this challenge was successful," while also swiping at the media and Hogg for misrepresenting the DNC panel's decision.

"The credentials committee believed, as they stated, that they are remedying a procedural flaw. But doing so the way they did, is a slap in my face. I’m frustrated, but I’ll be ok," Kenyatta wrote, adding in another post that "this story is complex and I’m frustrated — but it’s not about (Hogg)."

The challenge was brought by Oklahoma DNC member Kalyn Free, who argued that the party violated its own rules and made it harder for a woman to be elected vice chair.

Her complaint was filed well before Hogg promised to challenge fellow Democrats.

The committee voted 13-2 on Monday evening after about more than three hours of discussion.

The party’s rules state that the DNC's governing body should achieve gender parity or get as close to it as is possible. Free argued, according to her initial complaint, which was shared with POLITICO, that Kenyatta and Hogg had access to more votes than Free and two other women running for the slot because the DNC’s rules were not properly followed and “made it impossible” for any woman to win the race.

"I have always known that the Democratic Party is the party of free and fair elections. Today, the credentials committee of the DNC confirmed that correcting mistakes in process, and protecting democracy is more important than saving face," Free said in a statement after the vote.

Earlier this month, Free told POLITICO her challenge was "about fairness," and added that her challenge had nothing to do with Hogg’s group funding primary challenges.

"This other thing — $20 million — that's David's issue," she said.

In a statement, Martin said he was “disappointed to learn that before I became Chair, there was a procedural error in the February Vice Chair elections.”

“The Credentials Committee has issued their recommendation, and I trust that the DNC Members will carefully review the Committee’s resolution and resolve this matter fairly,” he said.

In the hearing on Monday, Free’s lawyers called in Hofstra professor Daniel Seabold, an expert in parliamentary procedure, to give testimony on Free's behalf, and his expertise seemed to sway some members of the committee.

“I’m gonna take the guy who wrote the book,” said former Oklahoma Gov. David Walters, a committee member.

The full DNC could opt to hold a virtual vote ahead of the meeting later this summer. Otherwise it will take the issue up during its August meeting.

Elena Schneider contributed to this report. 

💾

© Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Fast Company

Joe Biden’s return to the spotlight this week is igniting anger among Democrats who wish the former president would ride off into retirement and stay there.

In a wide-ranging interview on “The View” with former First Lady Jill Biden on Thursday, Biden owned up to his role in Donald Trump’s return to power even as he defended his decision to stay in the race as long as he did last year. But if he was expecting a warm reception, he’s not getting it. Many in his party are desperate to turn the page on Biden's presidency, craving new leaders and fresh faces as Democrats look to find a way out of the political wilderness.

“It’s time for Joe Biden to go away with all due respect and let the next generation of Democrats take the mantle,” said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha. “Every time he appears on a show or says something, it's just another week or a month that we have to defend him and remind everybody that we got beat by Donald Trump, again.”

“For those of us trying to rebuild the brand, it does no good when you're constantly reminded about the old brand that won't go away,” Rocha said, adding that the only good thing about the interview is that it was quickly overtaken by news of the selection of a new pope.

Biden’s reemergence comes as the Democratic Party works to move beyond its current predicament — shut out of power in Washington and embroiled in a fierce debate about the party’s direction and strategy against Trump.

However unwelcome for many Democrats, Biden is an unavoidable subject.

The former president’s allies are bracing for the potential release of audio of Biden’s interview with Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents and raised questions about his mental acuity. That’s in addition to an upcoming book by two high-profile journalists that promises to shed light on Biden’s decision to run for reelection “despite evidence of his serious decline” mentally, according to promotional copy for Original Sin, set for release on May 20.

For many Democrats, both events are dredging up past problems— not just around Biden's age, but also inflation and the party’s handling of cultural issues.

"Every interview that Biden does drags us backwards and reminds people of the older generation of Democrats that got us into this mess — when attention is our scarcest resource, we need to prioritize hearing from the next generation of leaders who could excite and rebuild the party," said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run For Something, a progressive group that helps young people run for office.

Some Democrats saw value in Biden's reemergence, even if they said he needed to be more thoughtful about how to present his message.

“I think this is an incredible inflection point as a nation, as a world and people like Joe Biden add value to the conversation — when [he’s focused] on being constructive,” said Democratic strategist Ashley Etienne, who served as a senior advisor to Biden, as well as to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“I do believe we’ve got to reconcile what actually happened, be honest about it, confront it and move past it. I think central to that … would be an autopsy from the party,” Ettiene added. “Absent that, then you got all these books that are going to fill in the gaps and the holes and it's going to keep perpetuating the problem and deepening the wound.”

A Biden adviser granted anonymity to speak freely said he had no immediate public events in the coming weeks.

At least some Democrats would welcome hearing more from him. Noting that Biden is the only person to ever beat Trump, Erica Loewe, who served as special assistant to Biden during his presidency, said that as the party tries to rebuild following its November losses, “there's no reason why Joe Biden should not be a part of this conversation."

"There's no question that Democrats as a whole have a messaging problem,” she said, “but that can't solely be blamed on Joe Biden."

Biden said in his interview that he’s working on his own book and offered his own assessment of Kamala Harris' loss to Trump, saying Republicans took “the sexist route” But he acknowledged his contribution to Trump’s victory, saying, “Look, I was in charge and he won, so I take responsibility.”

Some Democrats appreciated his willingness to say that publicly.

“I think people have wanted to hear him acknowledge some sense of responsibility,” said longtime Democratic strategist Karen Finney, who worked on HIllary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She also said many Democrats were more upset that Biden, who had cast himself as a transitional figure, ran for reelection anyway.

That, she said, “goes back to his initial promise, where he said that he would only serve for one term.”

Relitigating the most painful parts of the Biden presidency has been especially frustrating for Democrats who see the party finally showing signs of life. Democrats got their preferred candidate elected statewide in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April, and Trump's handling of the economy — which had once been a strength — is quickly becoming a liability.

And though Democrats’ chances of retaking the Senate are slim as they face a deeply unfavorable map, the picture is looking brighter for them than it once did, with popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia passing on a Senate bid against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and former Republican Gov. Chris Sununu forgoing a run for an open Senate seat in New Hampshire.

For some Democrats, Biden’s return only pulled attention away from that string of good news for the party.

“Most Democrats … are tired of the distractions,” said Georgia-based Democratic strategist Andrew Heaton. “The last thing we want is anything that's going to feed it to the naysayers who are going to point to see: ‘once again, it was a big cover up in the party.’”

Heaton likened Democrats’ current situation to a wildfire. At some point, he said, it will be important to understand how it started. But for now, he said, “Digging into the machinations of the Biden reelect is not something that I think a lot of folks are focused on right now.”

He said, “Like, can we just move on?”

Adam Wren, Elena Schneider and Liz Crampton contributed to this report.

© Stephanie Scarbrough/AP