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

The Trump transition beauty pageant is entering its final round, with just the main prize—Treasury—yet to be determined. (He just named former Florida A.G. Pam Bondi as his replacement pick for attorney general after Matt Gaetz dropped out.) This could all wrap up in the next 24 hours, so I wouldn’t get too comfortable.

Also, in case you weren’t in L.A. last week, my partner Baratunde Thurston led a spectacular panel at Puck’s inaugural Stories of the Season event featuring the directors of some of this year’s best documentaries: Josh Greenbaum (Will & Harper), Morgan Neville (Piece by Piece), Shiori Ito (Black Box Diaries), and Matt Tyrnauer (Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid). Thanks to Mayer Brown for sponsoring it. Incredibly, Tyrnauer revealed that he had to pivot his documentary when James Carville “inserted himself into the 2024 election cycle in a very unexpected way”… and then had to recut the movie again when Harris lost. Check the Q&A out here.

In tonight’s issue, more on the last-minute jockeying for Trump II cabinet posts, the finger-pointing at Howard Lutnick, Matt Gaetz’s post-A.G.-nom future, and the emerging slugfest at the D.N.C. as Rahm Emanuel hangs around the hoop.

• The Mar-a-Lago membership drive: When Trump first won office in 2016, he hiked the initiation fees at Mar-a-Lago back up to $200,000. (It had been reduced to $100,000 years earlier, in the wake of the Bernie Madoff scandal, which was acutely felt in the Palm Beach community.) The initiation fee was increased again this summer—this time to $1 million, a number that Trump flaunted in an interview with Bloomberg. At the time, Trump had boasted that there were only four open spots. Well, those spots seem to remain open and there’s been a hard push to sell them. The word around Palm Beach is that there are around 30 vacancies, a number that tends to fluctuate with the actuarial tables. Of course, the fee is really about being able to get onto the patio and bend Trump’s ear while he’s eating his well-done steak and two scoops of vanilla ice cream (guests get only one scoop). A significant investment, sure, but high potential R.O.I. for anyone seeking access.
• 🎧 Presidential pyromania: On the latest issue of Impolitic, my colleague John Heilemann was joined by Tom Nichols, staff writer for The Atlantic and professor emeritus of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, for a candid discussion about Trump’s foreign policy appointments and the myriad challenges 47 will face upon returning to the Oval, from Ukraine to the Middle East. [Listen Here]

Trump himself formally closed the book on Gaetz-gate with a farewell Truth Social post, not 24 hours after V.P.-elect J.D. Vance deployed a day’s worth of political capital ferrying Gaetz between Senate offices in an attempt to drum up support—and, in retrospect, to gauge the resistance to his candidacy. That same day, the Times published documents related to the federal investigation into payments Gaetz allegedly made to sex workers over several years. (Gaetz was investigated for sex trafficking but never charged.)

But Trump seems to have moved on easily, and perhaps completely. Hours later, he named a replacement nominee, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi. Trump’s Truth post gave no indication that he planned to offer Gaetz a consolation prize, à la some special-assistant-to-the-president-type role that the Senate has no say on. “I look forward to seeing all the great things he will do,” Trump wrote, conspicuously omitting the three little words every ambitious pol pines to hear: “In my administration.”

So where, exactly, will Gaetz wind up? A few hours ago, his wife, Ginger Luckey, posted a wistful photo of the two of them walking up the Capitol steps with the caption “end of an era.” Adorable, sure, but people like Gaetz don’t just go away. When Trump nominated him to lead the Justice Department, Gaetz immediately resigned his seat in the 118th Congress, and declared that he did not “intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress”—to which he’d just been resoundingly reelected. But intentions are typically predicated on circumstances, and now, some are musing that Gaetz might simply walk back into his old job.

Of course, returning to Congress could reactivate the Ethics Committee investigation into his alleged sexual misdeeds, which became inactive (due to a lack of jurisdiction) when Gaetz resigned. At the very least, it would resurface a debate that the Florida congressman would surely prefer to go away. Democratic Rep. Sean Casten moved on Wednesday to force the full House to vote on making the committee’s report public, and has said he intends to continue pushing for this despite Gaetz withdrawing his candidacy. Notably, Gaetz announced he was dropping out of contention roughly 15 minutes before CNN reported that the Ethics Committee had learned that a woman, who testified that she had sexual relations with Gaetz as a minor, recently alleged that it had happened twice.

And yet, as repugnant as Gaetz is to Democrats—and also to many Republicans in Congress, given his role in defenestrating then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy—Florida remains much friendlier terrain. McCarthy, himself, discovered this the hard way when he encouraged retired naval aviator Aaron Dimmock to primary Gaetz this cycle. The challenger lost by 45 points. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that Gaetz makes a run for governor in 2026, when Ron DeSantis hits his term limit, and perhaps spends the intervening time years the rounds on alt-right TV.

It’s not far-fetched. According to one recent poll, the favorite in that race is Casey DeSantis, who has an early 22-point advantage over Gaetz. But party insiders, tired of being pushed around by the first lady and the governor, had been eyeing Gaetz—at least until the A.G. nod, when they kicked off a campaign to support a bid from Rep. Byron Donalds, which involved preparing a media campaign and outreach to Florida G.O.P. influencers.

Once upon a time, Ron DeSantis might have placed Gaetz in the Senate seat being vacated by Marco Rubio—Trump’s pick to head the State Department—thereby thinning the gubernatorial field for Casey and keeping the DeSantis family in Tallahassee. After all, Gaetz was once close to the couple: He was one of DeSantis’s only friends in Congress; helped prepare him for gubernatorial debates; and was one of four people on DeSantis’s first transition team. But those days are long gone. Casey banished Gaetz when the allegations surfaced that he had been sex-trafficking minors. “I think Casey DeSantis would strongly object to Matt being allowed in the governor’s mansion to interview for the position, much less actually be appointed to it,” said Florida Politics founder Peter Schorsch.

At least one place you can still expect to find Gaetz is on the Mar-a-Lago patio. And Gaetz would never pit himself against Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and current R.N.C. co-chair, whom the president-elect is pushing for the Florida Senate seat. So in the end, the 2026 race for Florida governor may be a Casey vs. Gaetz showdown after all.

Many are blaming transition co-chair Howard Lutnick for the holdup. “Lutnick made a mess of things by throwing himself into the middle of the Treasury fight,” said an advocate for Scott Bessent, who had been at the top of the shortlist for Treasury until his knife fight with Lutnick. (The latter ended up nominated to helm Commerce.) “He pulled a Dick Cheney. He was supposed to throw an honest process, but just lobbied for himself.”

Since then, Trump has added a few new names into the mix, including Apollo C.E.O. Marc Rowan and former Fed governor and Bush alum Kevin Warsh. Meanwhile, Senator Bill Hagerty, Trump’s former ambassador to Japan, has also emerged as a top contender after losing a bid for secretary of state. I’m hearing that Bessent may end up in another economic position, perhaps on the National Economic Council, as a consolation prize if he loses the Treasury fight.

I predicted weeks ago on CNN that Trump, after choosing loyalist disruptors like Gaetz and Hegseth, and unsurprising fringe surrogates like Gabbard and Kennedy Jr., would select a name brand for Treasury. And with Steve Schwarzman and Jamie Dimon taking themselves out of the running, it made sense that someone like Rowan has emerged as a dark horse. Last night, my partner Bill Cohan reported that Rowan is very much in the lead. “It’s his job to lose,” Bill wrote. We may know as soon as the end of this week.

Naturally, there’s a burgeoning anti-Rahm contingent as well. Ken Martin, the head of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—who most people outside of D.C. couldn’t pick out of lineup—launched his campaign with 83 endorsements from D.N.C. members, leading some insiders to compare him to Keith Ellison, who consolidated early support in 2017 before eventually flaming out. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, 2016 presidential candidate, and current head of the Social Security Administration, also pitched himself for the job—but came out of the gate with endorsements from just three committee members from Maryland, although he only announced his bid four days ago. State Senator Mallory McMorrow of Michigan (and viral speech fame) has yet to announce but is seriously considering the job, and is someone seen as a generational change agent and disruptor—qualities, obviously, that the D.N.C. could benefit from.

One lingering question is whether any former presidents—ahem, Barack Obama—will put their thumb on the scale. Of course, given the 2024 outcome, it’s unclear whether a Joe Biden endorsement would help or hurt. But Obama’s imprimatur would make it nearly impossible for Rahm to lose. “Obama’s the X-factor. It’s also where folks like Steve Israel and David Axelrod come out if they think that Obama will endorse,” the former official said.