Happy Monday and welcome to The Best & The Brightest, I’m Peter Hamby. Today, a gut check on the boomlet for Tim Scott, a genuinely nice and genuinely conservative candidate custom built for National Review cruise-goers and Republican mega-donors who have never met a real voter in their lives.

But first…

By Tina Nguyen

• Oh, Mother: If you thought it was brutal to watch Tucker Carlson dress down Mike Pence in front of a room full of Christian activists at the Family Leadership Summit, in Des Moines, imagine being in the room. The beleaguered presidential candidate—a self-declared “born-again, evangelical Catholic” who was selected for the 2016 ticket because Trump needed to persuade religious voters that he wasn’t a sleazebag—was repeatedly booed on Friday, especially when he voiced his support for supplying Ukraine with weapons. Pence also received tepid applause whenever he talked about his faith. He even got an “oooooof” when he attempted to snap back at Carlson.

  Outside the room was even worse: According to two attendees, after the interview, Pence walked into a V.I.P. luncheon held by pollster Frank Luntz and The Family Leader head Bob Vander Plaats, to the apparent surprise of the attendees: big-money donors and activist network heads not only from Iowa, but from as far away as Wisconsin and Florida, who had certainly not expected Pence to show up to glad-hand. “I wouldn’t say it was a cold reception, but it was just a little awkward,” one attendee told me. “It definitely felt like he crashed it.”

  A spokesman for Pence told me that the event hosts “said it would be fine to pop into the luncheon.” Luntz confirmed that the invite had not been extended to other candidates, but that he’d asked Pence if he’d like to join when he ran into him backstage, just after the Carlson interview. “I thought it was a nice thing to do,” he told me.

• The Megyn Kelly Summit: Eight years after Trump initiated his ugly one-way feud with Megyn Kelly during a testy presidential debate—Kelly asked him to account for calling women “‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals;’” Trump responded “only Rosie O’Donnell”—the former president and former Fox News host appear to have reconciled. “She was the one that gave me that terrible question,” Trump said Saturday at the Turning Point Action conference. “But she has been all in. She’s been great. By the way, not to me—she’s been great for the country. She wants our country to survive.”

  Trump was referring, of course, to Kelly’s semi-recent reincarnation as a post-NBC-cancellation podcast culture warrior, with a particular and very au courant fixation on “woke” indoctrination in schools, sex-ed, trans women in sports, and so on. It was likely a smart move, for Trump, given Kelly’s renewed relevance at the white-hot center of the conservative grievance industrial complex. Kelly happily reciprocated, revealing on her podcast, The Megyn Kelly Show, that she’d had a private one-on-one audience with Trump before his TPUSA speech. “It was frankly great to see him,” she said. “All that nonsense between us is under the bridge, and he could not have been more magnanimous.”

  And now for some McConnell succession whispers…

By Abby Livingston

• McConnell Succession Whispers: Over the past month, a startling number of my conversations with Republicans on the Hill have taken an unsolicited turn toward the question of Mitch McConnell’s potential retirement. McConnell, after all, took a serious tumble this past spring, which put the 81-year-old Senate minority leader in the hospital and kept him out of Congress for about six weeks. McConnell, of course, has given exactly zero indication that he’s going anywhere. But from conversations with K Street consultants and Senate staffers, it’s clear that the G.O.P. political class is beginning to ponder a post-McConnell future.

  The chatter only escalated since the Senate returned from the Fourth of July recess. Nevertheless, I’m told that all is quiet on the succession front, given the high regard for McConnell among most of his peers. Indeed, there have been no discernible signs of whipping or cajoling, nor would any such activity be wise or welcomed at this point. The leadership race to replace him has long boiled down to “the three Johns”—John Barrasso of Wyoming, John Cornyn of Texas, and John Thune of South Dakota. Multiple sources tell me the race is likely winnowing down to Cornyn and Thune. But I still have vehement voices in my ear who say Barasso, the most conservative of the three, remains very much in the hunt—whenever it commences.

• Censure Fever: Ritchie Torres is leading a bid to censure fellow New Yorker George Santos in the House for “blatantly lying to voters about his life story,” per The New York Times. Given that Torres is in the Democratic minority, it’s a long-shot effort. But this comes after House Republicans successfully censured Democrat Adam Schiff. Increasingly, rank-and-file House members are bracing for censure fever through the rest of the term.

And if that’s not enough, they’ll need to possess supernova-like attentional powers that can rival the most famous politician on the planet, and win over both the honchos at Fox News as well as digital nihilists of the right-wing internet, all while feeding aggrieved Republican primary voters a steady diet of culture war negativity and smash-the-left fury.

And that’s all before the first vote in Iowa on January 15. Somewhere in there, this fearless candidate—the white knight hope of G.O.P. donors and bow-tied columnists who want to rescue their party from Trumpism—will find time to eat, sleep, raise more money, and maybe squeeze in a few minutes on the only treadmill at the Coralville Holiday Inn Express.

Who might this swashbuckling Republican be? It appears that some members of the country club set have already started to give up on Trump’s closest challenger, Ron DeSantis, who has stalled in the polls and announced over the weekend that he’s shedding campaign staff to cut costs. So, Republican power brokers are now turning their skittish eyes to someone else in the race: the improbable Tim Scott.

Top Donors, Souring on DeSantis, Start Looking at Tim Scott, ran a marble-mouthed Politico headline last week, noting that billionaire Estee Lauder scion Ronald Lauder had recently jetted to South Carolina to meet with the senator, despite having given money in the past to DeSantis. Another big G.O.P. donor charmed by Scott, Andy Sabin, unintentionally demonstrated what the term “donor maintenance” means, telling Politico that he really enjoys it when Scott texts him back. “He’s the one guy running who’s got some personality and charisma. His delivery is terrific,” Sabin said. Scott also has the support of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, as my partner Teddy Schleifer has detailed, meaning Ellison could single-handedly fund Scott’s super PAC for as long as he wants, sort of like Sheldon Adelson did with Newt Gingrich in 2012.

Scott has also been endorsed by some of his fellow senators in Washington—senators, of course, love their own—including John Thune, a gentle Trump critic. Beltway columnists have also taken a shine to his unprecedented campaign which, if successful, would make Scott the first Black Republican presidential nominee in American history. George Will, whose wife is advising Scott’s campaign, opined over the weekend that the Republican nominee in 2024 will not, in fact, be Trump or DeSantis—but rather someone more hopeful, optimistic, less abrasive than either of the two frontrunners. I wonder who he was talking about.

My second reaction was to go to Expedia and see how much a quick round trip flight from Washington or New York to Des Moines or Manchester might cost. Turns out, not very much, only a few hundred bucks. Which is lovely news for the Republican donors and Washington elites who are suddenly rooting for Tim Scott. Because they need to have a conversation with an actual Republican primary voter in the year of our lord 2023. As of today, according to polls and interviews with people who vote in caucuses and primaries, those voters are interested in Trump, DeSantis, and no one else.

Scott is running on optimism, on the American dream, and his Christian faith, reprising many of the same themes that once made Ronald Reagan so popular. His Instagram bio even says the nation is at “a time for choosing,” a line guaranteed to titillate someone with a prized collection of Barry Goldwater buttons.

Scott’s throwback message is custom built for National Review cruise-goers who wear colorful socks to honor Bush 41 and still believe the Republican Party is defined by the three traditional stools of principled Christian conservatism, a muscular foreign policy, and green eyeshade fiscal conservatism. That message is perfect for rich Republicans and conservative chin-strokers who still think their party can go back to normal, but it has almost zero resonance among Republicans in the Trump era.

Some perspective here: Lots of Republicans in Washington and South Carolina know Tim Scott and think he’s a nice guy. I also know from experience. He’s genuinely a nice guy! But according to a Morning Consult poll last week—posted just as these donors were hyping Scott to reporters—67 percent of Republican primary voters said they haven’t seen, read or heard anything positive about the candidate at all. And almost half of Republican primary voters said they either have no opinion about Scott generally, or haven’t heard a thing about him.

How much of a political threat is Scott to Trump? When he joined the race in May, Trump welcomed him thusly: “Good luck to Senator Tim Scott in entering the Republican Presidential Primary Race. It is rapidly loading up with lots of people, and Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable.” Scott, too, generally avoids criticizing Trump—a pretty good tell that he’d love to be picked as his running mate come next summer.

DeSantis, undeniably, had a clumsy adjustment from Florida to the national stage, which has sparked concerns among big donors, who are ultimately just political hobbyists with big checkbooks. Having covered four presidential campaigns and been inside plenty of G.O.P. fundraising events from Costa Mesa to Palm Beach to Indian Hill, I can also tell you that they’re easily panicked, and they want to ride with a winner. Whatever the source of their wealth, they’re rarely the kind of people who understand how campaigns and politics really work, nor are they great at predicting the future.

More money might flow to Scott in the coming weeks and months as he bathes in good headlines while DeSantis grins awkwardly at retail stops in full view of the cameras. And more donors might stiff-arm DeSantis if they start to worry that he’s too negative and too much of a culture warrior to win in November—donors like Florida billionaire Thomas Peterffy, who stopped giving to DeSantis because he signed a restrictive abortion ban. Peterffy has since given money to the Super PAC of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another ambitious Republican candidate who is adored by the wealthy set but completely unknown to Panera Bread customers in Council Bluffs.

If donors are suddenly worried about DeSantis’s conservatism, however, it needs to be said that Scott is also as conservative as it gets. Scott is Mike Pence with a better sense of humor and a more compelling biography, the son of a poor single mother who made it to college on a football scholarship. He’s a devout Christian who can quote scripture as well as any pastor, and once nailed the Ten Commandments to the wall of the Charleston City Council building. He bragged early in career about being a virgin well into adulthood and advocated for abstinence education while in Congress.

These traits will certainly play well among evangelicals in corners of Iowa and South Carolina, but they might not wear well with swing voters. Scott speaks in vague terms about his own positions on abortion and has dodged questions about whether he backs a national 15-week abortion ban, a question he’ll face again and again until he has an answer.

Which leads to a final note for freaked out Republican donors: Unlike DeSantis, Scott has never really faced a difficult campaign—and nothing like the campaign where he’ll have to make up those 47 points and get past Trump. In Republican-dominated South Carolina, from his races for city council and up to the state house, Scott won plurality victories in primaries, and coasted to re-election once in office. He was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2012 by then-governor Nikki Haley, who is also now running for president and must be infuriated by the sudden affection for Scott, who has since won re-election, over and over, with ease.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, little matters in the Republican race at this moment until the first debate in August, when millions tune in and we’ll see who is up to the challenge of muscling Trump aside when it counts. In the meantime, in these slow days of summer, our bored political class is really just looking for new storylines and new faces. Dial a donor, get a scoop!

A few Republican strategists I chatted with over the weekend said the Scott boomlet reminded them of the 2012 Republican primary, which saw a durable frontrunner in Mitt Romney face a series of would-be challengers who got media and voter buzz for a hot minute before flaming out. And Trump, of course, has much more of a chokehold over the party than Romney ever did. “We’re just going to do this for months,” one Republican told me. “Every non-Trumper gets a month. Then we’ll tire of the strained logic and say, ‘Maybe it’s Vivek!’ And keep going down the line.”

That “Vivek,” by the way, would be Vivek Ramaswamy—the anti-woke author from Cincinnati who currently leads Tim Scott in every 2024 poll.