The Playbook Podcast

As the humanitarian disaster in Gaza shifts American politics and opinions about Israel, the entire issue is quickly becoming the Democratic Party’s first foreign policy litmus test of the 2026 and 2028 cycles. Playbook’s Adam Wren and POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly look at how that’s playing out in Michigan’s pivotal Senate primary, which is a microcosm of the broader dynamics shaping the party: a divide that isn’t so much left vs. center or progressive vs. moderate, but institutionalists vs. disruptors. All of that, plus: President Donald Trump’s latest wave of tariffs went into effect overnight, and what we know about the latest rumblings of a coming meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The White House is turning the screws on red-state elected officials to gerrymander new electoral maps and squeeze more GOP seats into existence ahead of the 2026 midterms. And the next big flashpoint comes not from Texas, New York or California, but Indiana, where Vice President JD Vance will be dispatched this week to meet with Gov. Mike Braun and push him to redraw the state’s congressional districts. Playbook’s Adam Wren and POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly talk through the thinking in the West Wing and the statehouse. Meanwhile, is the White House’s latest law-and-order messaging — whether talking about Washington D.C. or the so called Speedway Slammer immigrant detention center — a sign of a broader attempt to shift the dominant storyline in the news? All that and more on today’s Playbook Podcast.

Today, the biggest story in Washington is about what’s happening everywhere else: from redistricting fights in Texas and California, to town halls in Nebraska and Michigan, to just a general unsettled mood in Washington. Playbook’s Adam Wren and POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly unpack it all and tell you how it’s reverberating in the halls of power in D.C.

Today, you can find Texas’ Democratic state legislators in Illinois, New York and Massachusetts. Where you won’t find many of them is Texas. That’s because they fled the state yesterday in an attempt to deny Republicans the quorum needed to enact a new partisan gerrymander ahead of the 2026 elections. The implications extend far beyond the Red River, with resonances for the balance of power in Congress, Democratic jockeying for 2028 and the potential weaponization of government depending just how far Gov. Greg Abbott and President Donald Trump are willing to go in response. Playbook’s Adam Wren and POLITICO White House reporter Jake Traylor unpack what it means and what to expect down the line.

Freshman Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) is the first out transgender member of Congress. Within days of her election this past November, she faced attacks from Republican colleagues who tried to draw her into a public conflict. Nevertheless, McBride has continued to find ways to forge ties across the aisle. In this week’s episode of The Conversation, Rep. McBride tells POLITICO’s Dasha Burns why she has prioritized bipartisanship: “Every person in this country goes to work in a workplace where there are people who think differently, live differently, look differently than they do. They figure out how to make it work. They treat one another with respect. This is the one place where we seem to not be able to muster the same maturity and mutual respect that Americans across this country muster every single day when they go into the workplace.” McBride says she hopes to bring “a sense of kindness and grace” to Congress despite the “reality TV show nature” of today’s politics. The two also discuss the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, how the Democratic Party can rebuild its coalition without “reinforcing right-wing framing” over culture war issues and why her pursuit of bipartisan legislation is in part a direct response to President Trump. “If we can't figure out how to solve problems across our political divide,” she tells Burns, “then I believe Trumpism only grows and worsens in this country.” Plus, White House reporter Myah Ward on Trump’s trip to Scotland and what it revealed about the working relationship between the president and European leaders.

With the markets closed and the August 1 deadline having passed overnight, President Donald Trump followed through on his pledge to impose a wave of new tariffs. But Trump is far from finished. The president announced that in one week, he’ll raise tariffs on more than 60 nations, including a number of close U.S. trading partners. Playbook editor Zack Stanton joins contributing author Adam Wren to discuss what to expect today and in the days and weeks to come.

For more than five decades, Joe Biden led an incredibly public existence. But now, in his post presidency, he’s entered a quieter, lonelier stage of life. He’s staffed by only one or two aides and Secret Service, holed up for hours at a time in Delaware working on his memoir with a new ghostwriter and racing against an aggressive form of prostate cancer while undergoing treatment. Most Democrats would prefer he keep a low profile. But what does Biden want? As he reenters the news cycle — both with a speech tonight to the National Bar Association in Chicago and as his former aides go before an adversarial House Oversight Committee — can he avoid being a millstone for the party he once led? Playbook’s Adam Wren and Dasha Burns walk through the implications of this moment and all the rest of the news you need to know today.

We’re halfway between the usual once-in-a-decade redrawing of congressional maps. So why are we talking about redistricting in 2025? As the White House looks for ways to keep its Republican House majority in the 2026 election, it’s pressuring red states to shift their maps and squeeze out a few more GOP seats. And that risks setting off a redistricting arms race, with big red and blue states threatening to one-up each other and remake the 2026 electoral map — literally. Playbook’s Adam Wren and Zack Stanton game out the scenarios in key states, and tell you what else you need to know today.

For a decade, President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement has bulldozed through GOP orthodoxy on everything from the national debt to immigration to trade to Russia. Now, there are fresh signs that it could be careening toward its last standing shibboleth: The U.S. special relationship with Israel. With the humanitarian disaster in Gaza sparking global outrage and a public split between Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Playbook’s Adam Wren and Dasha Burns check in on what’s animating the president’s new posture — and what we can expect from here.

Vice President JD Vance’s first six months in office have been an exercise in stealth. Yes, he has a very public role. But to understand how Trump’s Washington truly works, you need to pull back the curtain on how Vance has approached his job — and what that tells us both about the MAGA’s present and its future. Adam Wren and Dasha Burns go inside the inner workings of the Trump White House and share their reporting. Plus, President Donald Trump’s Scotland trip continues as he prepares for a meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is expected to press him on the spiraling humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary is getting lobbied by the MAHA movement to restrict food dyes and ultra-processed foods, as well as by the food, agriculture and pharmaceutical industries to reduce government oversight. “We want to go bold and there are a lot of things to do,” Makary tells POLITICO’s Dasha Burns. “But we also want to find common ground and work incrementally.” At the same time, he says, “The amount of pressure I feel from industry or other branches of government is zero.” Makary also discusses how the agency is addressing women’s health and access to mifepristone, what he calls a “child vaping epidemic,” and explains the rationale behind FDA staffing cuts as well as some controversial hires. Plus, White House reporter Jake Traylor joins Burns to discuss the mood inside the White House amid the fallout over the Jeffrey Epstein story, why President Trump is “itching” to get back on the campaign trail ahead of the 2026 midterms and whether GOP candidates in swing districts will welcome him.

Today, even as President Donald Trump heads to Scotland, his attention lingers stateside — and maybe not for the reason you assume. Trump has fully invested himself into the coming midterms, with high stakes both for his political project and for himself. Looming over it all are the ghosts of 2018, when Trump’s Republicans lost the House and handed the gavel to a new Democratic majority that went to work stymying his agenda and launching investigations into his conduct. What did he learn from that experience and how is that shaping the outlook for the 2026 election? Adam Wren and POLITICO White House reporter Myah Ward break it all down.

It’s the biggest story in Washington: Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed President Donald Trump in May and told him that his name — among many others — appeared multiple times in the files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Now, the White House’s Epstein problem has grown into a full-blown crisis and entered a new and potentially more damaging phase. Playbook’s Adam Wren and Dasha Burns unpack it all — the spin, the lines of attack and what you need to know about where things head from here.

For more than two weeks, the Jeffrey Epstein saga has blotted out the sun in Washington. But it’s only now — with the House heading out for a monthlong recess as GOP leaders adjourn the chamber rather than allow a floor vote that would hasten the release of the Epstein files — that the storyline is threatening to break out of the bubble and follow congressional Republicans back to their districts, nudged along by gleeful Democrats. Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and chief correspondent Dasha Burns talk through what that might look like, the potential pitfalls for Democrats and Republicans and what President Donald Trump finds especially frustrating about the whole ordeal.

With no new enterprise journalism published recently on the “Epstein files” front, President Donald Trump’s allies are catching their breath. Democrats are riding what could be a sugar high, having already cost the House GOP some votes this week. But as the aperture widens, are Republicans actually finding themselves in better shape than conventional wisdom would suggest ahead of the 2026 midterms? Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and chief correspondent Dasha Burns talk through that and two other key questions just now coming into focus about 2026.

As the Epstein storm bears down on the White House, some of the same dynamics that contributed to the president’s rise to power now threaten his administration. Among them is the attention economy, which has utterly transformed American politics — and which Trump's innate grasp of helped him secure a second term. Now, with 2024 behind them, have Democrats fully absorbed one of the lessons of their defeat — and is the Epstein story an example of just how much things have changed? Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and chief correspondent Dasha Burns talk it through.

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt is a lawyer, former state attorney general and a skilled navigator of the old — and new — wings of the Republican Party. He also has another title: White House whisperer. Schmitt joins POLITICO’s Dasha Burns to talk about his closeness with the Trump administration, driving the Senate’s $9.4 billion rescissions bill, his involvement with passing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” his belief in Medicaid reform, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files and what he describes as his “America First” — but not isolationist — foreign policy approach. “I think a slur that's often uttered is that it's an isolationist point of view,” Schmitt told Burns. “That's not true at all.” (Note: This interview was conducted before the Senate and House passage of the rescissions bill.) Plus, POLITICO reporter Ben Jacobs digs into his reporting on social media influencers running for office and how the phenomenon is reshaping electoral politics. Listen and subscribe to The Conversation with Dasha Burns on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The longtime friendship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein came in for a close-up in a much-anticipated Wall Street Journal report last night that detailed a long-ago “bawdy” birthday greeting the future president sent to the future convicted sex offender. Immediately, Washington was ablaze with chatter — about the reporting, about the White House’s response and about the story’s potential to reunite the deeply fractured MAGA movement that had recently seemed so divided over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly joins Playbook contributing author Adam Wren to walk through what we know and what to watch from here.

The Jeffrey Epstein news cycle is here to stay. And that’s increasingly frustrating President Donald Trump, who has grown accustomed to being able to exert control over the news cycle for much of the past decade. There’s a policy side to this, of course, as a number of prominent Republicans and MAGA figures are calling for a special counsel to investigate the files and the DOJ’s handling of them. But there’s also a pop cultural aspect to this, as the story has spilled over into the zeitgeist. Contributing author Adam Wren and chief Playbook correspondent Dasha Burns discuss how we got here and what comes next.

There’s a glut of action from Republicans throughout Washington — from new economic messaging from the White House to a big rescissions vote in the Senate to a new crypto bill in the House. But the big topic of conversation in D.C. continues to be the DOJ’s non-release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. That’s frustrating President Donald Trump, who has grown accustomed to being able to change the topic du jour when it doesn’t suit him, as POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly tells Playbook contributing author Adam Wren. It’s delighting Democrats, who continue to troll the GOP over it. And it’s splitting Republicans, including many prominent members of Congress who are calling on the Justice Department to release the files. Where do things head from here? Megan and Adam talk through the potential political implications.