Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, birthday edition! Yes, you’ve read that right: it’s been two years since Puck launched, and as someone who was here ever since we started the company in an actual basement—come on, we were a startup—I’m so proud of how much we’ve grown since, and I’m quite excited to storm Washington with my colleagues. (To wit: Tara Palmeri has a Ringer podcast! Julia Ioffe just interviewed the Secretary of State! We hired Abby Livingston! Teddy Schleifer lives here now!)

Allow me to quickly shill our birthday sale: New subscribers can take 25% off a yearly subscription. That’s $75 a year, or the price of 15 lattes, if you measure wealth by lecturing-a-millennial standards. In addition to our Washington coverage, you’ll also get insider-only news about Taylor Swift, Larry Ellison, David Zaslav, Elon Musk, and other American oligarchs of interest. That’s the magic of Puck: we spy on the masters of the universe, and you get to read about it. Ok, on to the news.

Today, a few notes out of the wilds of MAGA Nation: TuckerCarlson’s attempts to turn into the BarbaraWalters of far-right populism; Vivek’s right-wing squeeze on DeSantis while running up against Trump; and McCarthy staring down the barbarians at the gates.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest drama on the Hill…

• Impeachment Hell (I mean purgatory!): It’s not a good sign when G.O.P House operatives cannot rhetorically agree over whether their current state of affairs is actual “hell” or merely “purgatory.” But that was the tone of conversations coming out of the conference on...