Habemus Speaker, finally, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. Tina Nguyen here, hoping that everyone in Washington was able to practice self-care yesterday, whether it was a $60 glass of whiskey at Jack Rose or a $6 shot of malört at Ivy and Coney. (Me personally? A glass of tempranillo and approximately 900 pitas at établi in Truxton Circle.)

🚨Also on the personal front, I’m terrifically excited to share with you that I wrote a book and it’s coming out next year: The MAGA Diaries, a political coming-of-age memoir, published by Simon and Schuster. Kirkus calls it “A sobering, endlessly readable fly-on-the-wall account of creeping fascism” (and gave it a star, my goodness) but I promise there are fun parts too.

Tonight, my reporting from Washington on how the Republican hardliner caucus—the twenty or so lawmakers who made McCarthy’s life hell—are responding to the out-of-nowhere ascension of Mike Johnson, the ultra-conservative backbencher who’s still a mostly unknown quantity, though not for long.

Before we get started, however, a quick note from my partner Teddy Schleifer with some news from San Francisco…

• Lina Khan, the crusading F.T.C. chief despised by Big Tech, is planning an event in San Francisco next week with startup accelerator Y Combinator, focused on antitrust issues, I’m told. Y Combinator is becoming more politically-minded under its new C.E.O., Garry Tan, as well as its new policy chief Luther Lowe, as they position YC to play the inside game in Washington. More interestingly, perhaps, it highlights how Khan is repositioning a bit herself after years of legal setbacks, by savvily cultivating new allies within the tech industry who appear aligned with her goal of bringing the Big Five (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google) to heel. This is Khan’s first trip to Silicon Valley since becoming the F.T.C. chief. —Teddy Schleifer

The potential Nov. 17 shutdown still looms, of course, but right now Washington is in triage mode, and the House G.O.P. conference is only capable of muscling through one day at a time. The House will recess for a long weekend, allowing wounds to become less raw (and members to catch up on sleep after this hell ride). But here’s what’s on Republicans’ minds until daily business resumes next week:

• Will heads roll?: A regime change in Washington usually means a staffing shakeup, and while this power shift will likely not be felt by members until after next year’s election, the staffer and consultant class is very anxious at present. Back when Paul Ryan took the gavel from John Boehner, the personnel changes were minimal—he even inherited Boehner’s top spokesman, Brendan Buck (who published his own thoughtful take on the current transition).

  Most politicians arrive at the speaker’s office with their own team of trusted aides, but Johnson does not have this kind of network. No Republicans I spoke with on Thursday knew enough about him (one operative blanked on his name in a Wednesday conversation) to predict what’s ahead. Will he take on McCarthy’s political operation? Or McCarthy’s official-side hands who know where all the bodies are buried inside the Capitol? And how involved will McCarthy be going forward?

  Alas, regime changes are a two-way street. I’m hearing that more than a handful of senior-level Republican House aides are at best indecisive about their futures, while others are preparing to exit the Hill after this episode. They’ve had their fill of chaos.

• Keep an eye on the committee chairs: Due to his lack of leadership experience, Johnson is expected to be the weakest speaker in memory. That could change with time and experience, but this is the most complex job in Washington and demands a mastery of the institution and its members. Johnson simply hasn’t been around the House or these responsibilities long enough to know how things work.

  That could empower the normie, old bull committee chairs. As a lobbyist pointed out to me today, Republicans have a strong lineup of committee leaders—most notably at Approps (Kay Granger), Foreign Affairs (Michael McCaul) and Energy and Commerce (Cathy McMorris Rodgers). If there is a power vacuum, we could see some of the most powerful committee leaders in a long time.

• How many skeletons are in his closet? Johnson’s spontaneous, swift ascent left party insiders with essentially zero time to vet him. Indeed, Johnson barely completed his acceptance speech before Democrats—most of whom had never heard of him 24 hours before—unleashed online open-source videos and news articles featuring Johnson’s hardline social commentary on issues like abortion and gay rights.

  Johnson’s fundamentalist Christian background clearly had never been massaged after a run-through in focus groups. While the oppo research did not surface much on television Wednesday night, due to the mass shooting and manhunt in Maine, this is not going away. Rest assured, Democrats are already brainstorming ads they intend to air tying vulnerable Republicans to those sentiments.

But that doesn’t mean that Johnson was a total outsider. Even back in January, one well-placed conservative insider suggested that Johnson could take a tack that Kevin McCarthy seemed unable to navigate. “Whenever I’d bring up his name, people were like, Oh, no, he’s too low, too unknown. He’s just not a big enough player,” this person told me. “I thought that he was underrated and I thought he was somebody that could bridge the two factions within the G.O.P. caucus: the moderates and the more MAGA conservatives.”

Now Johnson is speaker based on that very premise, one that 220 extremely exhausted Republicans have embraced, and the MAGA establishment has come to terms with, albeit with some trepidation. Johnson is less familiar to them than the candidates that they’d initially wanted: Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan, followed by Florida second-term congressman and rising MAGA star Byron Donalds, who had challenged Johnson in the final round of voting but came up short. “They trusted Byron more, but they’ll take Mike Johnson,” a Republican operative told me shortly before he won the speakership. “And you know, honestly, if we get Mike Johnson at the end of this, I think a lot of people will say, okay, He’s not Jim Jordan, but he’s better than McCarthy. So we’ll take it.”

Less clear is whether Johnson is a real-deal America-First populist, in addition to his reputation as a hardline social conservative. As one right wing lobbyist put it bluntly to me: “I’m not sure even he [has a theory of governance] yet.” My insider pal was a little more on the level: “He knows how to wear a tie and walk and talk. Trust me, that’s the bar. The bar has been set pretty low.”

There are a few major priorities that Johnson has to address in order to keep the MAGA caucus on his side. “Address debt, Ukraine and then [the Southern] border,” summarized the operative. “Border’s probably number one, Ukraine is 1b, deficit spending is 1c. Like, literally, they’re all tied for the top.”

While securing funding and a hiring increase at the Southern border should be an obvious gimme to unite the caucus (though possibly D.O.A. given the Dems’ control of the Senate and White House), the Ukraine situation will be a major test of Johnson’s ability to hold the caucus together. Hardline conservatives are adamant about ending our aid packages to Ukraine, but as the prospect of a Hamas-Israel war looms, any funding requests for Israel—a sacred obligation, in their eyes, among many others—will inevitably be bundled with funding requests for Ukraine by the Biden administration. “I don’t think Johnson will get a lot of leeway on Ukraine” from the “M.T.G.s of the world,” noted the lobbyist. “Republicans would desperately love to separate Ukraine from that discussion, but they can’t since they control one third of the government… so everyone’s expecting the Senate to jam and the House to fight.” As speaker, Johnson will be expected to lead that fight, though it remains to be seen whether he will do so in a manner conducive to his most volatile constituency.

But once that debate begins, come January, Johnson will have little margin for error. In recent months, the far right has come out hard against omnibus funding bills, arguing that the all-at-once approach allows Democrats to slip in legislative priorities at the expense of Republican ones, and will inevitably demand individual appropriation bills that will be argued about, one at a time—an inevitable time-suck that yields bitter yet granular fights. If Johnson tries to pull that one off, the operative suggested, the right flank will be “pissed” and potentially retaliate. “No omnibus,” he reiterated.

Johnson also faces a third threat, though not necessarily from the MAGA wing. The speaker brawl not only paralyzed Congress in the middle of an international crisis, it also portrayed the Republicans as incapable of governance, putting their already slim House majority at stake. Of course, one of the key jobs of the House speaker is to fundraise for his or her conference; McCarthy, a prodigious rainmaker, hauled in $16 million last quarter. Johnson has raised less than $600,000 this cycle.

Yes, Johnson will get an immediate boost by inheriting parts of that operation, which allowed McCarthy to raise over $80 million in the last cycle, but much of the fundraising infrastructure is still under McCarthy’s influence. And some Republicans worry that McCarthy may not fully hand over the reins, especially given the rumors flying around the Hill that the McCarthy camp tried to tank several other speaker candidates—Johnson included.

“[Will] McCarthy continue to undermine him, secretly and quietly? I hope not,” the G.O.P. insider said, adding that McCarthy should offer to help Johnson fundraise for the next cycle “to show goodwill” and keep the House in Republican hands after this thoroughly embarrassing month. “They’re all in jeopardy,” the source lamented. “But that’s why you’re gonna need even more money.”