Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tara Palmeri.

We’re less than four weeks out from the election, and I’m sensing intense anxiety in Washington, where Democrats and Republicans, alike, don’t seem fully prepared for the possibility of a second Trump administration. Mark Leibovich, my guest on the latest episode of my podcast, Somebody’s Gotta Win, agreed. “People don’t think a lot about the possibility of Trump winning,” he said, observing how much of the town’s trepidation is currently being channeled into the campaigns.

Earlier today, an anti-Trump Republican texted me to echo the sentiment. “You’re so right about D.C. not being ready for Trump,” he wrote. “Through all the thinking and planning we’ve done, there’s a collective willful blindness.”

Well, I can report that the Trump team is forging ahead, regardless of whether Washington has its collective head in the sand. In fact, Donald Trump Jr. has assumed the role of de facto transition chief, even if the campaign is giving the General Services Administration agita by refusing to sign the ethics paperwork that facilitates the transfer of power. More on all that, below the fold.

🎧 Programming note: Tuesday on Somebody’s Gotta Win, Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of the Philadelphia area and Trump’s Pennsylvania advisor David Urban debated the battle for the election’s most critical swing state. We got into the weeds about the state’s various counties, media markets, and voting proclivities. Listen here.

Now, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest chatter on the Hill….

• A gray wave?: The Democratic Party has a bad habit of encouraging older members to stick around past their sell-by date, thanks to party mores that prioritize seniority above all else in committee leadership. As a result, Democrats have struggled much more than Republicans with aging members hanging around the Rotunda, clinging to their perches, despite sometimes overt signs of physical and mental decline. Younger Democrats mostly grumble in private over their elders’ unwillingness to make room for new blood.

  That might change next cycle, according to a Democratic consultant who predicts a brutal 2026 cycle of intraparty warfare, with much more pressure on aging House and Senate incumbents to retire—and short of that, potential primary challenges.

  The zeitgeist changed over the summer with Biden’s decision to withdraw, according to this consultant, and the wait-your-turn mentality is losing its appeal. “Joe Biden passed the torch to the next generation, and our nominee has been running on a new way forward,” he said of Kamala Harris. “How are any Dem incumbents in 2026 going to argue against primary challenges to them—regardless of ideology—that suggest it’s time to turn the page?”

  Traditionally, Democrats hate primaries, which drain party resources and consume media oxygen, and will do anything to avoid them. But the Biden debacle represented a breaking point for ambitious younger members, testing their deference to the literal old guard. Permission, in a way, has been granted, precedent has been set, and the gloves may come off the next round.

• Bi-polling disorder: Political mood swings are a weekly occurrence on Twitter/X, where every micro-shift in the polling seems to catalyze an outsize reaction. Earlier this week, it seemed Harris had the momentum. Today, her supporters are reaching for the Xanax as a new slew of polling suggests Trump has the upper hand in several swing states. Offline, however, operatives and congress members that I speak with on a regular basis are agnostic about the day-to-day state of this race.

  For starters, these people say, the news cycle is so volatile that polling—always a lagging indicator—is less useful than ever, especially in an otherwise mostly static race. And this year, with so much uncertainty in the air, pollsters are struggling more than usual to predict who will actually turn out to vote. (It’s not their fault; nobody knows who’s actually going to show up.)

  There is widespread agreement that the Senate is probably headed for a Republican majority. But no one has a handle on who will take the presidency and the House. It has become glaringly apparent in the last few weeks that Democrats are dominating Republicans in party fundamentals: the TV air war, the ground game, fundraising, etcetera. “The lack of a ground game for Trump that’s been widely reported has Republicans very anxious,” a down-ballot Republican consultant told me. “Is that going to be a fundamental factor on Election Day? We are not going to know until after the election.”

  As for the Democrats, this was no accident. They worked the entire cycle for these advantages. But you won’t find a semblance of arrogance in the party. There’s lingering P.T.S.D. from 2016, of course, and Democratic strategists closest to the House races are playing it safe, predicting just a one- or two-seat gain. Beyond the party’s structural advantages, it feels like there’s been a decision to avoid party infighting around issues like the Green New Deal or immigration until after the election. Democrats know they can still lose the White House, the Senate, and the House. All of which raises the difficult question: If they did everything right this year and still don’t win, what do they do next?

Harris, for the most part, has largely avoided generating fresh gaffes by keeping her distance from Biden—walking the line between defending his record on the economy and positioning herself as a fresh start. So you can imagine the glee this past week when The View co-host Sunny Hostin asked Harris to name something specific she would have done differently than Biden during their time together at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied. Within hours, Trump allies were packaging the clip for digital ads.

Nevertheless, not-a-thing-comes-to-mind-gate does underscore one of Harris’s central vulnerabilities: running as a challenger instead of an incumbent. There’s no doubt that Harris is in a difficult position, trying to distinguish herself from Biden while not offending his ego or other members of the party. After all, most Democrats support Biden’s accomplishments, even as his favorability remains low. “Through no fault of her own, Harris has been forced into this high-wire balancing act, juggling two competing narratives, being the change candidate while also being proud of the record they have,” said Michael LaRosa, a former Biden administration official. “She should double down and say, Hell yeah, I’m proud of what we’ve done in the past four years.”

A Harris campaign source told me they’re not concerned with the new ads. But other Harris allies have expressed frustration that she wasn’t prepared with a well-crafted answer, or any answer, to a question she knew was coming. “It’s inexplicable that she didn’t have an answer ready to go,” said Steve Schmidt, a Lincoln Project founder who worked for Bush and McCain. “That’s the very first question that Harris should have been prepped for: How are you going to be different than Biden?”

Perhaps Harris was overly concerned about accidentally pissing off the Bidens and their colleagues back in the White House; perhaps she simply froze. Regardless, Harris clearly handed Republicans at least some of the ammunition they were seeking to blast holes in her image as a change agent. “It was the biggest gaffe of the election so far, that will end up in every TV ad everywhere,” said a Trump advisor, seemingly oblivious to the tsunami of toxic sludge coming from their own candidate. “That will run until election day on heavy rotation,” said David Urban, Trump’s advisor in Pennsylvania, adding that nothing else Harris has said so far has “landed perfectly bad.”

The resulting Trump ads interspersed the clip from The View with footage from the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, news reports of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, and dire economic numbers—albeit from a few years ago. Battleground Republicans are seizing on it, including Rep. John James in Macomb County, Michigan, who quickly clipped it to attack his Democratic opponent, Carl Marlinga. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is playing a clip of the line at his events.

Last week, Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal that his job is to keep the “snakes” out of the White House—a comment that was widely interpreted as announcing himself as his father’s real emissary. But those who know Don Jr. don’t exactly see him as a snake slayer. On the contrary, despite his fire-breathing persona online and at rallies, he’s known to be susceptible to flattery, just like his father, and loves to facilitate a reconciliation, perhaps understanding his father’s fetish for a convert. (As Mark Leibovich smartly noted on my podcast: “There’s nothing Trump loves more than groveling.”)

Don Jr. has also forged new coalitions, unthinkable back in 2016, by facilitating the endorsement and surrogacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and trying to find him a place in the administration. He’s even empowered rising stars like Vivek Ramaswamy, who is currently investigating how to dismantle government agencies for the transition. And he’s been an advocate for Susie Wiles, which could tip the scale in her favor to land the chief of staff role over contenders like Brooke Rollins and Kevin McCarthy. “Look, he’s a gatekeeper, whether he’s resurrecting people or not,” said a source close to Don Jr. “Jared [Kushner] was super transactional, he was a consensus figure. He was like, ‘I do deals, I don’t have an ideology.’ Don Jr. actually wants to change the party and believes in America First.”

Also unlike Kushner, Don Jr. is not expected to join the administration and is not viewed as someone who would be recruiting any actual experts to run the government. Rather, he’s seen as the loyalty filter who can stress-test fealty to the America First policy agenda and, ultimately, Trump—potentially weeding out frenemies who have acquired the “snake” designation, like John Bolton or Nikki Haley.

It’s hard to say whether he would use his veto power against, say, Gary Cohn, the former “adult in the room” in Trump’s White House, who I’ve been told has been poking around to see if he can fill another role in a second Trump administration. He wouldn’t be interested in running the National Economic Council again, sources say, but he could be eyeing a top job like treasury secretary or Federal Reserve chair. For the Treasury role, of course, Cohn would be challenging much closer Trump allies, like John Paulson or Steve Witkoff, both of whom attended Trump’s rally in Butler last weekend, essentially auditioning for the job. As Don Jr. would probably advise him, reconciliation does take some groveling, too.