“The DeSantasy Is Over”

Good evening and welcome back to my private email for Puck. To put it lightly, this week we’ve learned that summer doldrums truly do not exist in MAGAworld, and, in fact, we might have seen the most pivotal moment for the G.O.P.’s chances in the midterms yet. That is, of course, until the next news cycle.

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“The DeSantasy Is Over”

Trump insiders are counting their lucky stars over an F.B.I. raid that seems likely to unify MAGA-land, potentially move up the former president’s announcement, and put DeSantis in a box.

TINA NGUYEN

Among the Republican operatives preparing for Donald Trump’s fiercely anticipated, increasingly inevitable 2024 announcement, news of this week’s F.B.I. raid on Mar-a-Lago was more than an unprecedented political outrage—it was also an incredible electoral opportunity. The one thing that reliably unifies the G.O.P., after all, is the perception that their institutions and values are under attack from the left. And what better enemy is there—in the post-Comey, post-Mueller, post-Russiagate environment—than armed agents of Joe Biden’s Justice Department executing a search warrant of the former president’s home over something as inconsequential as, say, a dozen boxes of improperly-stored classified documents?

It’s still unclear, of course, what the F.B.I. was really looking for in the Mar-a-Lago basement, or how the raid fits into a presumably broader D.O.J. investigation, or why the typically over-cautious Merrick Garland apparently blindsided the White House by taking such an extraordinary action. The legal implications for Trump are similarly unclear. But as a source close to Trumpworld put it to me, inadvertently quoting Rahm Emanuel, you “never let a crisis go to waste.” Absent some kind of justification from the D.O.J., which would...

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