Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, our new-ish daily compendium of political news from across the White House, Capitol Hill, K Street, the Pentagon, and the media covering it all. I’m Tara Palmeri.

In tonight’s edition, my conversation with Puck’s founding partner and senior media correspondent Dylan Byers about whether Trump’s likely indictment will galvanize—or turn off—the G.O.P. base and swing voters; how the spectacle will play out across the rapidly transforming media landscape; whether Fox News will pull its punches, post-Dominion; and the DeSantis political wild card.

Dylan: You’re hitting on a very important question, Tara, which is: What is Fox’s posture toward Trump in a post-Jan. 6, post-Dominion, and possibly post-indictment landscape? The recent Dominion filings revealed that Fox’s leadership and its top primetime anchors were willing to suppress their personal antipathy toward the president in order to stay on the right side of his base for the sake of the business. But that hasn’t always required a full-throated defense of Trump, himself. More often than not, you’ll see Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity criticize his opponents or portray him as a victim of a left-wing or establishment conspiracy.

In the case of an indictment, it’s highly likely we’ll see the primetime trifecta focus on the Manhattan D.A., Alvin Bragg, and push the idea that he’s orchestrating a political witch hunt, like you said. They may highlight how the prosecution could use an unprecedented strategy of combining two charges—falsifying business records and violating election law, to elevate the former to a felony—which they might spin as evidence that the prosecutors are overreaching. However they go after the D.A.’s office, it’s a convenient way to thread the needle: it shifts the focus from Trump’s criminal liability, which is the salient question, to suspicion of the prosecutor’s motives, which feeds conspiratorial thinking.

More broadly, Fox News is at a unique and fascinating juncture here in terms of editorial strategy, and the biggest X factor is Ron DeSantis. If he goes after Trump, Fox might be able to better gauge where the political winds are blowing, and whether he has the potential to supplant Trump as the party’s standard bearer. It certainly seems as though Trump’s star is fading, and his political prospects are growing weaker, but there’s no absolute clarity on that yet. For the time being, DeSantis is playing it safe and using the aforementioned accuse-the-accusers playbook: On Monday, he labeled Bragg a “Soros-funded prosecutor” who was “pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.” That’ll likely be the tone on Fox for the near term, until DeSantis gets more aggressive—or Trump goes to jail.

Does that match your thinking, Tara? How do you think DeSantis and other Republicans nominees (and those in the shadow primary) will respond to Trump’s indictment?

I suspect you’ll continue to hear these types of short statements from DeSantis, similar to his thoughts after the Mar-a-Lago seizure, that don’t mention Trump but blame Biden or the Democrats for the “weaponization of federal agencies.”

Dylan: And do you think this ultimately hurts or helps Trump?

Tara: I think the indictment helps Trump become the Republican nominee. He already has a huge lead with G.O.P. primary voters, claiming some 40 percent of them. His message has long been that he’s a political target, but even more that he’s protecting his grievance-laden base from the Biden administration and the “woke” H.R. departments coming for their livelihoods. As Trump said after his first impeachment: “In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you.”

As our partner Tina Nguyen has previously noted, these voters cast ballots emotionally—they’re not considering his electability against Biden. If that weren’t the case, he wouldn’t be leading the polls after already losing an election. So while this indictment might help him secure the nomination, that’s only half the story. The Democratic view, of course, is that anything that elevates Trump likely helps Biden in the long run. Trump is their preferred opponent, after all, because he essentially neutralizes Biden’s age issue. Plus, Biden already beat Trump in 2020, and like we saw in the midterm elections, there is genuine Trump fatigue among independent voters, never-Trump Republicans, and swing voters. That was evidenced by the rejection of many of his handpicked candidates in the general election. An indictment reinforces all of that.

Biden’s pollster John Anzalone predicted this before the midterms when he cited Trump fatigue as the reason Republicans couldn’t take advantage of a bad political environment for Democrats, pointing out that many Republicans now identify as independents because of Trump. So yes, this will fire up Trump’s base, but could ultimately help Biden in a general when the same voters who gave the Democrats the Senate again, against all odds, have another opportunity to cast their ballots.

Beyond Fox, how do you think the rest of the networks will cover Trump and other candidates on the campaign trail? I’m not seeing a lot of Trump, while Glenn Youngkin and Mike Pence both got “town hall” events at CNN. How do they rate? And will we see more of them?

Dylan: Well, we know what MSNBC’s posture will likely be: “a pox on all their houses.” The open question—and it will be fascinating to watch—is CNN. In its new iteration under Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN has positioned itself as a nonpartisan, news-first outlet catering to Republicans and Democrats alike. And, indeed, WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav and CNN chief Chris Licht have made a very big deal about getting a lot of Republican lawmakers to come on air, to the point where it occasionally seems like the only metric by which they measure their success (it’s certainly not ratings, or revenue).

I’m sure Licht sees 2024 as an opportunity to showcase New CNN’s editorial posture. But a Trump vs. DeSantis primary campaign is going to stress-test the thesis, because both these candidates have shown a penchant for demonizing the media merely for acting as fact-checkers. Licht may believe that he is restoring trust and redefining the network’s reputation, but it’s more likely Trump and DeSantis will define it for him. Now, he may not encourage his hosts to go after the Republicans when that happens, à la Jeff Zucker, but I can’t imagine folks like Jake Tapper and Don Lemon are going to bite their tongue once lies and incivilities are back in the headlines. So it’ll be a tough line to toe.

As for those town halls, no, they don’t rate. The Pence town hall, which drew more than a million viewers, was an exception in part because it came on the heels of the 2022 midterms. But Youngkin drew just 364,000, and a mere 89,000 in the demo. That should surprise no one at CNN, because almost every town hall the network has done over the last five years has drawn roughly those numbers. And yet, Licht’s new CNN primetime strategy is to add more of these town halls, even though they’ve been a drag on the network’s already lackluster ratings. But as Zaslav said when he dropped by CNN headquarters last week: “Ratings be damned!”

Tara: That’s fascinating. In terms of covering Trump directly, what is Licht’s calculation? Is he hiring more reporters? I see journalists sourced in Tallahassee getting snapped up, like my old Politico colleague Matt Dixon, who was hired by NBC News. What do you think?

But, perhaps the more pertinent question is: Do you think the candidates still care about how they’re covered and portrayed on CNN? Isn’t so much of their press strategy these days about going direct to the voter? And what about lawmakers on the Hill? Do they need CNN as much as they need, say, Punchbowl?

Tara: They do care about how they’re portrayed on CNN, and I know that G.O.P. leadership has been encouraging members to appear on the networks. A lot of them were banned for supporting the election conspiracies—remember when Tapper said he wouldn’t have election deniers on his show? Others were afraid to go on and face tough questions about January 6. In the end, Republican leaders felt that the midterm elections were a reflection of the fact that they weren’t able to take their message to potentially independent voters, who are watching CNN and the broadcast networks. It’s never good when the only G.O.P. voices making the arguments for the party are anti-Trump “pariahs” like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who buck the party and leadership. It all plays into the narrative that the party is too extreme, which is hurting them in elections.

The Washington Post’s Paul Kane wrote about this phenomenon recently, in which some of the most hardcore MAGA warriors are quietly returning to making appearances on “fake news.” Take Jim Jordan, who turned up on NBC’s Meet the Press last month for the first time in four years. It’s not just him—Kevin McCarthy, Michael McCaul, Michael Turner and James Comer have all been on the Sunday shows in this new congress. McCarthy himself had not been on the Sunday shows for two years, despite the fact that they garner an audience of about 10 million each Sunday between the five of them. I think Punchbowl and other newsletters in town, like this one, are great for talking to the inside audience which eventually trickles to the outside audience. But CNN and the Sunday show are a perfect place to deploy your message to independent voters and suburban women—you know, the people who decide elections.

As for the presidential candidates, I think DeSantis et al. can probably ignore CNN and MSNBC ahead of the primary election, and continue to call them fake news. It all plays well with the G.O.P. base, for now. But I expect that before the general election, when they’re creeping to the middle, they’ll likely return to knocking on those same doors. Or at the very least, they won’t turn down their requests for a debate.