Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, birthday edition! Yes, you’ve read that right: it’s been two years since Puck launched, and as someone who was here ever since we started the company in an actual basement—come on, we were a startup—I’m so proud of how much we’ve grown since, and I’m quite excited to storm Washington with my colleagues. (To wit: Tara Palmeri has a Ringer podcast! Julia Ioffe just interviewed the Secretary of State! We hired Abby Livingston! Teddy Schleifer lives here now!)

Today, a few notes out of the wilds of MAGA Nation: Tucker Carlson’s attempts to turn into the Barbara Walters of far-right populism; Vivek’s right-wing squeeze on DeSantis while running up against Trump; and McCarthy staring down the barbarians at the gates.

But first, here’s Abby Livingston with the latest drama on the Hill…

• Impeachment Hell (I mean purgatory!): It’s not a good sign when G.O.P House operatives cannot rhetorically agree over whether their current state of affairs is actual “hell” or merely “purgatory.” But that was the tone of conversations coming out of the conference on Wednesday. As such, Kevin McCarthy is the least-envied man in Washington right now.

  Under siege from Matt Gaetz & Co., there is no more important skill to McCarthy’s survival right now than his ability to whip votes (which is something he has struggled with in the past). Wednesday afternoon dealt a fresh blow on that front: Leadership pulled a Pentagon funding bill off the floor because it lacked the votes to move it forward.

  Gaetz continues to threaten to invoke a motion-to-vacate, which will put McCarthy in serious political trouble if it comes to pass. Adding to his problems, a House leadership aide who’s in close touch with members tells me, the horseshoe theory could be taking hold within the conference: Some moderates are becoming equally unhappy with McCarthy’s concessions to the far-right and are at risk of joining those same strange bedfellows in the effort to oust McCarthy.

  And so, instability abounds. House Republican leadership is functioning without Steve Scalise on the scene, as the majority leader is currently undergoing cancer treatment. But despite the agony coalescing around McCarthy, there continues to be zero detectable chatter about a viable alternative. However, that situation is evolving. Since January, the Republican mantra has been that the conference is so ungovernable that “it’s not like anyone else could do this job better.” But that sentiment seems to be evolving this week, with a former House Republican chief of staff wondering aloud: “Who else would actually want this job?”

• Mitch’s Media Reprieve: As chaos ensues on the House side, it’s a more sanguine situation over on the Senate side, because you know who’s not leading Congressional news anymore? Mitch McConnell. Indeed, the House side drama is drowning out chatter around McConnell’s future. Also, the Senate is smoothly moving forward with their bipartisan appropriations bills with an aim to exact maximum pressure on the House when the two camps eventually have to come together on legislation that can pass both chambers. A diminished McConnell is holding up fairly well in comparison. Even so, I’m hearing that the world comes to a stop inside the Capitol Hill Club, a House-side Republican hangout, whenever McConnell is on live television.

• Romney Rambles On: There was some veiled commentary about the gerontocracy in Mitt Romney’s retirement announcement Wednesday afternoon. The 76-year-old, who will end up serving a single term in the Senate, pointed to his age as a reason to step down. “At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid-80s,” he said in a video. “Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders.” For what it’s worth, Romney was hardly seen in this light among the younger Republican set, many of whom worked on his 2012 presidential campaign (and he showed he could still perform a dead sprint inside the Capitol based on Jan. 6 security footage…). The decision is yet another blow to the fading Republican establishment, with a younger-generation G.O.P. campaign operative reacting to me in real time to the news with a not-safe-for-broadcast-TV expletive.

Among the interviews that have already been published are Carlson’s dialogues with accused sex trafficker and men’s rights influencer Andrew Tate in Romania over the summer, and his conversation with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which went live last week. Coming up is Carlson’s interview with Javier Milei, a right-wing presidential candidate in Argentina with distinctly Trumpian vibes, which will go live in the coming weeks. As for his appearances in the Middle East, a source close to Carlson told me: “All I can say is every world leader over that way… literally all of them… are very interested in speaking with Tucker.” (Netanyahu? Assad? The source declined to push back when I asked if Mohammed bin Salman was on the schedule.)

Carlson’s interviews with foreign dignitaries and heads of state would appear to contrast with his domestic concerns, which have increasingly veered into National Enquirer, and sometimes Infowars, territory. Shortly after suggesting on a podcast that the U.S. is “speeding toward” the assassination of Donald Trump, Carlson published a nearly hour-long interview with a convicted fraudster who claimed that he’d had coke-fueled gay sex with Barack Obama while Obama was first running for president. From the outside, it’s been quite a brand transformation for Carlson over the past several years, from a mediocre trust-fund-assisted Weekly Standard magazine writer and D.C. cocktail party jester, to a conspiracy-slinging internet content creator, with a stop as Fox News’s most popular primetime host along the way.

But people close to Carlson aren’t surprised by his evolving interests and worldview, which closely tracks that of his highly curated media diet and social circle. Last year, during an interview, he told me that he relied on information primarily from his own research and what people would text him, as well as alternative news sites like The Grayzone, a far-left, pro-Assad, Ukraine-skeptical blog run by Russia Today contributor Max Blumenthal. Sounds about right.

But sources inside and outside the campaign have also expressed some anxiety about precisely the same thing. Vivek is animating the enthusiasms of non-traditional voters, who may or may not stick around for him when the dust settles, rather than the actual Republican primary voters he’ll need unless, of course, he becomes a definitional driveby candidate. The Make America Great Again PAC has been flooding my inbox with the latest polls out of Iowa, all of which show Donald Trump up by about 35-plus points against his nearest rivals, including Ramaswamy, DeSantis, and Haley.

The math is difficult, but not impossible, to overcome. The makeup of the electorate, as one Iowa G.O.P. strategist told me, is not in DeSantis or Ramaswamy’s favor, but neither is it fully locked down for Trump. “There’s probably only about 20 percent of voters who are like, I’m just totally done with Trump. So that leaves a potential of 80 percent of the votes Trump could secure,” he noted. Realistically, Trump is not going to win that entire 80 percent, but it’s hard to see a path for either DeSantis or Ramaswamy, already competing for the same MAGA-adjacent vote, to chip into Trump’s support without obliterating the other. All it takes is a plurality to win.

Will Rogers, the chair of the Polk County G.O.P. and an old Iowa hand who’s unaffiliated with any of the candidates, agreed. “Maybe there’s that 30 to 40 percent who are solidly Donald Trump supporters at this point,” he told me. But the other quasi-viable candidates—such as Haley, Pence and Tim Scott—are, at the very least, trying to “find a path” out of Iowa that would give them some momentum going into New Hampshire and South Carolina. “Somebody’s gonna come into a closer second [in Iowa] than what we’re seeing right now,” he said. “Who that is, I’m not certain.”

At the same time, it seems that all the non-Trumps—even the exhilarating Ramaswamy—are grappling with a similar case of voter malaise. Back in 2016, of course, everyone from Marco Rubio to Ted Cruz and Ben Carson managed to draw thousands of people to their events in Iowa, rivaling the crowds that turned up for Trump (who eventually placed second in the caucuses). This year, the Iowa consultant noted, nobody but Trump is even coming remotely close to bringing those same levels of energy, much less filling the same rooms.

But the Iowa G.O.P. operative also offered an observation from the ground, one that could open a lane for Ramaswamy, or perhaps also for Haley, whose numbers have been rising: “While I don’t think that any of these guys are making enough headway, I do think that there are a lot more undecided votes than is being shown in the polls that are pushing people to have to make a decision.” In other words: If you were to corner an Iowan and ask who they would vote for right now, they’d probably say Trump. Prod them more, however, and you’ll find they’re still open to learning about other options. “I believe, potentially nearly half of the electorate is actually up for grabs,” he predicted. “The problem is, nobody’s necessarily making the closing sale very well right now.”

For months since the speakership vote, Gaetz and his allies have frequently claimed that McCarthy has violated the power-sharing agreement that he supposedly struck with the 20 holdouts, including during their showdown over the debt ceiling in May. (Gaetz ultimately voted against the bill.) The two sides have been rushing toward another collision over an overdue spending bill to fund the federal government, which will be forced to shut down in two weeks if they can’t come to an agreement. The conventional wisdom, of course, was that McCarthy would offer up impeachment as a make-good, or to divert the energies of the hardline caucus, or even as a quid pro quo for whatever votes he needs to keep the lights on. Instead, the olive branch appears to have backfired: “Him starting an impeachment inquiry gives him no—zero—cushion, relief, brace, as it applies to spending,” House Freedom member Bob Good told Politico.

Maybe that’s because the hardline crew intuits, perhaps correctly, that McCarthy is an opportunist, not a true believer. Apparently McCarthy has been privately telling centrists that opening an impeachment inquiry won’t necessarily lead to an actual impeachment. The speaker is famous for doing whatever it takes to manage House crises hour to hour, without much thought for the consequences the next day.

So far, McCarthy has brushed off Gaetz’s threats as typical bluster—“He can threaten all he wants, I will not inject the speaker into the independent ethics committee to influence in any way at all,” he said Tuesday, referring to Gaetz’s call to hasten the impeachment process. But McCarthy could probably stand to try thinking a few more steps ahead. Gaetz is notorious for hating McCarthy’s guts; three people close to the Freedom Caucus told me that they wouldn’t be surprised if he decided to follow through his motion-to-vacate threat, if only just to make his life hell.