Trump says I don't know her to Project 2025
Plus: Biden isn't backing down
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According to Google Trends, search interest is now higher for “Project 2025,” the blueprint to dramatically remake the federal government in a second Trump term, than it is for pop music’s next big thing, “Chappell Roan.” The 922-page plan calls for consolidating power under the executive branch, cutting funding for renewable energy, and banning pornography, among other measures, while Roan’s hit “Good Luck, Babe!” just entered the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time ever. Everyone’s talking about it, but former President Donald Trump claims to know nothing.
“I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump wrote in a post on his social network on Saturday (the project is staffed with former Trump administration members, like director Paul Dans, who was a chief of staff at the U.S. Office of Personnel management, and John McEntee, who was a former director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office). “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump continued. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
Trump’s disavowal comes as interest grows in what exactly his allies have planned for a potential second term following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity. President Joe Biden’s campaign hopes Americans stay curious and don’t like what they see. “If he wins, there is no question Trump will use it to pass his Project 2025 agenda,” the Biden campaign said in a statement this weekend. “Together we must defeat him.” They’re also hoping their content can show up in search results. Today the Biden campaign launched its own Project 2025 website. — Hunter
Biden isn’t backing down:
Like a tech worker put on a performance-improvement plan during a white-collar recession, Biden is busy trying to keep his job. Only the Lord Almighty could convince him to drop out, he told ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos in their Friday interview. “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get outta the race,’ I’d get outta the race,” he said. The Lord Almighty did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Biden spoke at church on Sunday (“I, honest to God, have never been more optimistic about America’s future if we stick together”), called into Morning Joe on Monday (“I’m not going anywhere”), and published a two-page open letter to Democratic lawmakers who returned today to the Hill (“I wouldn’t be running again if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024”). Later this week, he’ll host NATO leaders and give a press conference.
The task Biden faces to calm nervous Democrats is no joke. Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) became the ninth House Democrat to publicly call on Biden to exit the race on Monday, and Netflix executive chairman and Democratic megadonor Reed Hastings said the same thing last week. But Biden said he’s moving forward. “The question of how to move forward has been well-aired for over a week now,” he wrote in his letter to Democrats. “And it’s time for it to end.”
A doctor specializing in Parkinson’s disease visited the White House:
Dr. Kevin Cannard, a neurologist and expert on Parkinson’s disease, visited the White House at least eight times in eight months, White House visitor logs show. The news led to some testy confrontations in today’s press briefing with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who wouldn’t answer questions about whether the doctor’s visits were about Biden. Biden’s medical examinations have “found no sign of Parkinson’s, and he is not being treated for it,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said, and White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor said, “President Biden has not seen a neurologist outside of his annual physical.”
What Biden said on his first call with the new U.K. Prime Minister
Biden called U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer last Friday after Starmer’s Labour Party ousted Conservatives to win a majority. The two leaders “reaffirmed the special relationship between our nations and the importance of working together in support of freedom and democracy around the world,” including continued support of Ukraine, according to a White House readout. Starmer will be among the world leaders in Washington this week for a NATO summit to mark the organization’s 75th anniversary.
How Trump is building up the next generation of Republican stars:
Trump isn’t just deciding who his new running mate will be, he’s building a new Republican bench. That’s according to a new report from the New York Times about how Trump is elevating potential vice presidential nominees, like North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Reps. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
The campaign has an internal booking team that gets potential Veep picks booked on cable news and quoted in conservative media, per the Times, and the campaign has also put potential running mates in touch with specific donors to ask for money for Trump’s campaign, fostering relationships that could bear fruit in 2028 and beyond.
“Trump has been enormously helpful to these people,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the Times. “They are all bigger and better known than they would have been without Donald Trump.” The need for a new running mate comes after former Vice President Mike Pence said he won’t endorse his former boss following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol in which Trump falsely claimed Pence could overturn the election results and Trump’s supporters chanted “hang Mike Pence.”
FLOTUS launches campaign military families and veterans group:
First Lady Jill Biden spent Monday traveling across the South promoting the Biden-Harris administration’s work with military members, their families, and veterans. At stops in Wilmington, N.C., Tampa, Fla., and Columbus, Ga., Biden promoted administration efforts including the PACT Act, the bipartisan bill that expands benefits for veterans who were exposed to burn pits and other toxic substances.
Biden said her husband “wakes up every morning ready to work for you” and considers supporting military members and veterans a “sacred obligation.” In Tampa, she launched the group Veterans and Military Families for Biden-Harris. This isn’t anything new for Biden; military families were among the causes she advocated for as Second Lady.
Harris is all in for Biden-Harris:
Speaking at the 30th Essence Festival of Culture in New Orleans Saturday, there was no daylight between Vice President Kamala Harris and the president, and she said the 2024 election is “probably the most significant election of our lifetime.”
“We have said it every four years, but this here one is it,” Harris said. “On one side you have the former president who is running to become president again, who has openly talked about his admiration of dictators and his intention to be a dictator on day one, who has openly talked about his intention to weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies.” And on the other side is Biden, though some Democrats actually hope it’s Harris.
The vice president is Democrats’ “one realistic path out of this mess,” according to the anonymous senior Democratic operatives who authored a document circulated among top Democrats and reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. A CNN poll released last week found Harris polling better against Trump than Biden is, and the poll found she has more support among independent and moderate voters than Trump does.
Ivanka says her kids are the reason she won’t get involved in the campaign:
Former first daughter and advisor to the president Ivanka Trump said her decision not to campaign for her father in 2024 “was a decision rooted in me being a parent.” During a podcast interview last week, Trump said “being in politics is a rough, rough business, and I think it’s one also that you can’t dabble in.”
“I think you have to be all in or all out,” she said. “For me and my family it feels right to not participate.” Trump described her time campaigning in 2016 as eye opening and said people she met would open up to her about their fears and insecurities with a level of candor she hadn’t experienced before. “The campaign lifted me out of a bubble I didn’t even know I was in,” she said.
When asked about her father’s legal peril, she said, “On a human level it’s my father and I love him very much so it’s painful to experience, but ultimately I wish it didn’t have to be this way.” Trump also spoke about her experience working in fashion. “I always loved fashion as a form of self expression as a means to communicate either a truth or an illusion,” she said. Building a good shoe, she said, “is architecture.”
You can be the voice of FLOTUS or Veep online:
The Biden campaign is looking to hire social media platforms strategists for the First Lady and Vice President. In job listings on Daybook, a political, policy, and non-profit jobs board, the campaign said it’s hiring strategist to “write daily content and manage scheduling for Twitter (X), Threads, Facebook, and Instagram accounts” and “strategize and execute innovative social media projects to help grow and engage our audience” for Harris and Dr. Biden.
The positions are based in Wilmington, Del., pay between $65,000 to $85,000 a year, and require “strong writing skills” and an “eagle eye for typos,” according to the job listing. The campaign is also hiring a senior advisor for entertainment outreach who will develop and implement “strategies to engage and collaborate with celebrities, artists, influencers, and creators across various platforms.” It pays between $140,000 to $185,000.
Republicans have a party platform again:
Ahead of next week’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, the Republican National Committee’s platform committee adopted a new platform after not writing a new one in 2020. Dedicated “To the Forgotten Men and Women of America” the 16-page document calls for sealing the border, carrying out the largest deportation operation in American history, preventing World War III, and keeping men out of women’s sports, among other priorities. Notably, it’s the first Republican platform to not call for a national ban on abortion in 40 years.
🇬🇧 Labour Party wins landslide U.K. election for first time since 2005, establishing new prime minister. In a historic turnaround, the Labour Party won the keys to No. 10 Downing Street. The ruling Conservative Party came second but suffered its worst election defeat in history under outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. [People]
🇫🇷 A coalition of the French left won the most seats in high-stakes legislative elections Sunday, beating back a far-right surge but failing to win a majority. The outcome left France, a pillar of the European Union and Olympic host country, facing the stunning prospect of a hung parliament and political paralysis. [Associated Press]
📺 Media, tech titans head for Sun Valley with streaming alliances top of mind. For many business leaders, streaming and potential alliances to help make the business profitable will likely take up a bulk of the conversation. [CNBC]
🧑🚀 MTV News repository of 460,000 articles launched by Internet Archive after Paramount’s content takedown. MTV News lives! Well, sort of. The not-for-profit Internet Archive assembled a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published at mtv dot com slash news. [Variety]
🤖 Meta’s making a change to the way it labels A.I. on its apps. Here’s why. The parent company of Facebook and Instagram announced in an updated blog post that it’s changing its labeling from “Made with AI” to “AI info,” noting that its AI-detection tools sometimes flagged images that were edited with AI but not made with it exclusively. [Fast Company]
Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” goes No. 1:
Shaboozey is now the first Black male artist in Billboard history to top both the Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs with his breakthrough hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” He follows Beyoncé who became the first Black artist of any gender to top both charts earlier this year with “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Yee, and I cannot emphasize this enough, haw.
We’ve reached the Hannah Montana generation of pop music:
That’s according to Rolling Stone, which noted the current crop of pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter, Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Jojo Siwa all grew up wanting to be Miley Cyrus’ character in Disney’s “Hannah Montana.” “We are now entering the Hannah Montana Generation of pop stars: young artists who are not just evoking the frilly and bold aesthetic and unapologetically sugary sweet music of the show but also the type of larger-than-life persona Montana had in comparison to ‘real-life’ [Miley] Stewart,” Rolling Stone wrote. Which means we’re no longer in the Britney Spears Generation of pop stars. It’s the end of an era.
Imagine Dragons gets called out for performing in Azerbaijan:
Serj Tankian, the lead singer of System of a Down, criticized Imagine Dragons for performing in Azerbaijan in a recent social media post. Tankian quoted Imagine Dragons lead singer Dan Reynolds who told Rolling Stone he doesn’t believe in depriving fans of seeing his band because of their leaders and government.
“I draw the line at ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Tankian wrote, noting that the Azerbaijani government is nine months into a blockade a former ICC respecter said qualified as genocide. “Would they play in Nazi Germany? Why don’t they want to play in Russia? Because it’s not popular?”
Kim K’s not a lawyer yet but she’s about to play one on TV:
Kim Kardashian said last year she planned to take the bar “in the next year or so,” but she’s not waiting on that to play a lawyer on TV. Kardashian will reportedly appear alongside Halle Berry and Glenn Close in a legal drama from Ryan Murphy about an all-female law firm in L.A.
There’s a “The Devil Wears Prada” sequel in the works:
Disney is reportedly developing a follow-up to 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada” with Meryl Streep reprising her role as fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly. Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, who worked on the first film, is in talks to return to write the sequel, according to Variety, which reports the film will cover Priestly “navigating her career amid the decline of traditional magazine publishing.” Relatable!
Vogue is still publishing in Ukraine:
Speaking of fashion magazines, the only thing that sounds harder than running one during the decline of traditional magazine publishing is running one in wartime. Vogue Ukraine editor-in-chief Vena Brykalin said her site published its first new content four hours after Russia first attacked, according to the Bulwark’s Press Pass with Joe Perticone. Brykalin said the publication has expanded beyond fashion and her beauty editor “would be literally working on stories how to survive rape and how to survive chemical attacks and all those kind of things.” Heavy stuff.
Nike’s Jordan Brand designed the French Olympic basketball uniforms:
The U.S. and its oldest ally France have a storied history of collaborations. There’s the Statue of Liberty, “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk featuring Pharrell and Nile Rodgers, and George Washington and the French fleet bottling up Cornwallis at Yorktown during the Revolutionary War. This summer, there will be another: Nike’s Jordan Brand designed the Olympic uniforms for the French basketball team.
Thanks for reading! See you next week. ⭐