Marianna Sotomayor

A brief guide to who made the cut to fly with Trump out of Ankara, and which cabinet secretaries were left behind as decoys for a potential Iranian attack. Plus: Democrats find the silver linings in Francesca Hong's Wisconsin primary implosion.

News and notes from the campaign trail: Trump’s Cory Mills snub, the new Democratic ’28 race lineup, and why pollsters aren’t worried about getting Wisconsin and Michigan so wrong.

Ron DeSantis may still harbor presidential ambitions, but after strong-arming allies, alienating donors, and losing his grip on Tallahassee, the former MAGA heir apparent is discovering that political capital depreciates faster than Gulf Coast real estate.

News and notes ahead of Florida’s primaries, where a handful of D.S.A. members are testing their luck, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is poised for a win despite the C.B.C.’s consternation, and a “carpetbagger primary” has drawn a rogues’ gallery of disgraced ex-congressmen.

Cory Mills lost his primary by 13 points, but is privately threatening to sink the party’s agenda—while Trump claims he’d urged him to drop out all along. Meanwhile, Florida’s G.O.P. gerrymander is looking like a possible “dummymander,” with Democrats poised to defend seats the new lines were redrawn to take away.

With the midterms just under 80 days away, House Republicans are already jockeying over who leads the Freedom Caucus next year. Meanwhile, operatives in both parties are tracking a slipping Hispanic vote that could swing a batch of down-ballot races.

News and notes on Republican grumbling over the $25,000-a-head convention Trump is staging in Dallas, the left's unease with Hakeem Jeffries's hush-hush Jared Kushner meeting, and the president's final push for Darline Graham in tomorrow's South Carolina Senate runoff.

House Republicans said they would be in trouble if the Iran War wasn't over, and gas prices hadn't dropped, by Labor Day—and now they're getting nervous. Plus, news and notes on Trump's barely-touched $400 million war chest, and a Pennsylvania poll that has bad news for everyone.

Members will soon come back from summer recess to perform some perfunctory tasks before returning to the campaign trail ahead of the midterms. But between the Iran stalemate and another impromptu trade war with Canada, a reality check is descending on members of the G.O.P. in both chambers.

A new report links the Trump administration's 271,000-person federal workforce cuts to real-world fallout, from a hobbled cyclospora response to the return of livestock-killing Screwworm. Meanwhile, House lawmakers are jockeying over the next Congress’s rules, including a proposed reform of its sexual-misconduct policy.