I’m Tina Nguyen, coming off an endless stream of media appearances, book talks, and podcast debuts for The MAGA Diaries and getting back to something more calm and less dramatic: reporting on the cold war brewing between Speaker Johnson and the House Freedom Caucus, where the motion-to-vacate W.M.D. appears to have been placed on the shelf, for now. More on that, below the fold.

Also: Don’t miss my partner Teddy Schleifer’s new reporting on the semi-panicked conversations taking place within the Koch network and the American Opportunity Alliance about the merits of continuing to support Nikki Haley or throwing in with Trump. (If you’re not already signed up for his terrific weekly newsletter, The Stratosphere, you can get on the list here.) Come for the high-level intel, stay for Teddy getting Tim Scott to throw Larry Ellison under the bus. (Seems to be his thing this week.)

But first…

• Feel DePain: Just because the Republicans have a tenuous majority in the House, doesn’t mean that there can’t be a little red-on-red primary violence. There are a number of incumbents on the Trump campaign naughty list for backing Ron DeSantis, including Laurel Lee, Thomas Massie, Chip Roy, and Bob Good. But not all face the same danger.

  It’s widely accepted that Lee had to endorse DeSantis, who’d previously appointed her Florida’s secretary of state, and while Massie’s fate is to be determined, it’s apparently too late for primary challengers to file against Roy in Texas. That leaves Good, who finds himself in the unusual position of being a genuine right-wing hardliner—he was part of the coalition that both blocked and then ousted McCarthy as speaker—who nonetheless committed the unforgivable sin of backing a Trump opponent. There’s certainly some people inside the Freedom Caucus trying to save Good’s hide—Dan Bishop, Andy Biggs, and Ralph Northam told Punchbowl that they would aid his reelection campaign—but he faces a veritable Trump praetorian guard in the form of colleagues Marjorie Taylor Greene (who formally endorsed his opponent John McGuire this week), Derrick Van Orden, Ryan Zinke, and Morgan Luttrell. Rarely does one see such a pure example of Freedom Caucus versus MAGA conservatism, which I’ll be watching closely.

• Lake’s fresh scalp: The Arizona Republican world is in a state of turmoil. Earlier today, Trump pal and G.O.P. Senate candidate Kari Lake received a political gift in the form of a recording of a conversation with Arizona G.O.P. chairman Jeff DeWitt, during which he seemingly attempts to bribe her into sitting out this Senate election cycle. He responded with a furious resignation letter.

  This infighting is likely a boon for Democratic nominee Ruben Gallego, just the latest unforced Republican error to redound in his favor. And it’s still a mystery if independent incumbent Kyrsten Sinema is running for reelection. Similar mayhem is also wracking Michigan Republicans, who just slapped a restraining order on their own recently ousted chairwoman.

  Both states are hosting competitive races that could ultimately determine which party controls the White House, the Senate, and the House. State parties, of course, have become less powerful over the years, but they remain hotspots of political professionalism. This latest round of drama suggests the slippage is continuing, but whether it translates into major consequences in Washington is yet to be seen.

• Welcome to the O.C….: Earlier this week, former House Democrat Harley Rouda dropped a veritable burn book on his ex-colleague Katie Porter as she heads into a heated stretch of the California Senate primary. The inciting incident seems to be an anecdote in Porter’s memoir where she alleges that Rouda tried to get her to valet his car. Rouda denied the charge in an op-ed in Porter’s hometown newspaper, calling her “shallow beyond the pale,” “classless,” “a liar,” “a bully with a white board,” and, perhaps most cuttingly, compared her to M.T.G.

  This Dem-on-Dem violence was overshadowed by the New Hampshire presidential primary, but it’s the talk of House Democratic circles. Rouda and Porter, after all, have history. They were part of the 2018 Democratic takeover of Congress, winning neighboring districts in the former Republican stronghold of Orange County. Rouda lost his reelection in 2020 and briefly considered running in the same district as Porter after 2022 redistricting, but he ultimately demured. Porter, of course, is currently in a dogfight with fellow House Democrats Barbara Lee and Adam Schiff, along with retired Dodger/Padre Steve Garvey, a Republican, for one of the top-two general election slots to replace the late Dianne Feinstein.

  The California delegation has always presented itself as a united power center within the House Democratic caucus, rivaled only by the Congressional Black Caucus in determining leadership races. But this Senate race has exposed fissures. The San Francisco Chronicle has a tally of congressional endorsements, and Schiff’s own campaign website boasts support from 70 percent of the delegation. Lee has backing from Ro Khanna and Maxine Waters, while Mark DeSaulnier and Sydney Kamlager-Dove endorsed both Schiff and Lee. Porter has the backing of only one Californian in the House, Robert Garcia.

  This op-ed is unlike anything I’ve seen in a long time from the usually congenial House Democratic caucus—which simply can’t be compared to the House G.O.P. conference, where calling a colleague a “little bitch” is just another day at work. However, most of my Democratic sources found the piece amusing, signaling that California is now so Democratic that even commentary of this caliber is unlikely to jeopardize the Senate seat.

There are several factors working in Johnson’s favor. For one, I’m told Donald Trump does not plan to intervene in the House’s arcane bickering, and is instead squarely focused on his presidential campaign and its attendant tasks (crushing Nikki Haley, holding rallies, surviving his criminal trials, beating Joe Biden, and so forth). Of course, he isn’t above lobbing a few bombs from midfield, but fiscal policy was never of much interest to Trump, who added some $8 trillion to the national debt during his four years.

Another harsh reality for frustrated hardliners, as a Republican close to the Freedom Caucus reminded me, is the challenged talent pool. Everyone else who reached for the speaker’s gavel last year—Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, Andy Biggs, Tom Emmer, and Byron Donalds—failed to unite the caucus. (Indeed, it took three weeks and five rounds of voting to even settle on Johnson, and partially because he was a virtually unknown backbencher at the time.) Other potential speaker candidates have their eyes set on higher callings: Elise Stefanik, another ambitious member of G.O.P. leadership, has been gunning for Trump’s V.P. slot.

Perhaps most importantly, Johnson is actually well-liked, or at least, not easy to hate: He’s amiable, MAGA-friendly, and fluent in the lingua franca of the far right. He’s also proven himself to be a solid fundraiser as speaker, a benefit that trickles down to the whole conference. Johnson’s fundraising operation, which he inherited in part from the ur-rainmaker Kevin McCarthy, hauled in $10.6 million in the last cycle, reassuring the N.R.C.C. and other outside allies that he can maintain cash flow continuity from the McCarthy era. Any threat to his speakership would have to come from the inside—and, inevitably, for personal reasons that are hard to justify.

Indeed, the bar for ousting Johnson keeps getting higher, according to my conversations with Hill sources—certainly beyond the personal animus that motivated Matt Gaetz’s defenestration of McCarthy, and well beyond any hardliner’s desire to punish him for a lack of purity. In fact, I can’t see a current situation where Johnson gets hit with a motion to vacate from the rightward flank, unless some House G.O.P. member, for whatever reason, goes completely off the rails.

The present lack of personal hostility toward Johnson also cuts both ways. For now, it’s his saving grace: He’s easy to get along with, and no one loathes him… yet. But office friendships under the Dome are always highly transactional. The general mood on the Hill these days is one of exhaustion, which explains in part why few members are ready to blow up House leadership and derail legislative work yet again. That said, as the second G.O.P. aide noted, these lawmakers have essentially reserved for themselves the right to revisit the motion-to-vacate W.M.D. should Johnson do something egregious, though the specifics of that red line have yet to be fully defined. “No one wants to M.T.V.,” he added. “That’s the last resort.”

At this point, it’s not so much that Johnson has to get the entire caucus to sing “Kumbaya,” or pound the hardliners into submission, or even win them over—he has to keep the entire rickety thing from falling apart at any given moment, a challenge he’s grimly accepted. “Sometimes it’s in members’ interests to disagree or oppose. Sometimes they don’t see or want to acknowledge the limits of a thin majority,” a Johnson ally told me. “But all see that he’s been given a very challenging task—that would face any would-be speaker—and receiving criticism is inevitable.”