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Illustration by Fernando Cobelo for POLITICO | Look, we admit it: Like just about everyone else on the internet, we’ve been locked in debate over New York Magazine's recent encroachment on Emily Post’s territory. But what works in New York doesn’t necessarily play down here in D.C. So we decided to make our own guide for how to behave in the nation’s capital. And no, there’s no item about standing to the right on the escalators, because … come on, we really shouldn’t have to say this. How do you hobnob with someone who’s name you’ve forgotten? How do you address that former officeholder at the gala? Can you ask Kim Kardashian for a selfie at the White House Correspondents Dinner? When should you disclose your political allegiances on a date? As a swamp denizen, you will live or die (or at least succeed or fail at networking) based on the answers. Part etiquette list, part combat guide, here are 28 rules you need to know to make it in a city where shameless striving is just the way it’s done. Did we miss any must-have tips? Let us know — they might make it into next week’s newsletter. Read the story. | | | | 
| “Just this week Michele Bachmann actually predicted that I would bring about the biblical end of days. Now, that’s a legacy.” Can you guess who said this about the former representative for Minnesota in 2015? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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Gilbert Stuart's 1796 oil on canvas portrait of George Washington on display at Washington's National Portrait Gallery. | AP Photo | Ugh, Presidents Day … This country used to love presidents, even when it hated them. From pious lessons about George Washington to salacious whispers about JFK and Marilyn Monroe, we relished peeks behind the curtain, hero-worshippers and dirt-diggers alike. But this Presidents Day, no one seems in the mood to celebrate. Things are so polarized that the institution itself has become a painful subject to think about. Which is bad news for the D.C. cottage industry built on presidential trivia. The churn of books on presidents has slowed. You even see it with White House Christmas ornaments: “We have people that come in and say, I’m not going to buy the ornament as long as this person is president or that person is president,” says Stewart McLaurin, leader of the White House Historical Association. In this week’s Capital City column, Mike Schaffer takes the presidency’s temperature by way of tomes and trinkets — and things aren’t looking so good.
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| 37 percent … of voters who sat out the 2020 presidential election say they’ve used cannabis in the last year, compared to 24 percent of Joe Biden voters and 19 percent of Donald Trump voters.
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Stephen Dupont’s photos, taken over four weeks In April and May 2022, show a Ukraine in-between. | Stephen Dupont/Contact Press Images | Ukraine Haunts a Photographer … Stephen Dupont is a veteran war photographer, but when he arrived in Ukraine in April last year, he was surprised at the silence, how “haunted” it felt. “There were people around, but they were all hiding,” he says. Over a four-week period, he captured the images in this stunning photo essay, exploring a Ukraine caught in a terrible liminality — “between life and death, war and peace, people leaving and returning, building and destroying, dying and surviving,” writes Sydney Gold. Windshields pocked with bullet holes. Children embracing. A dog, left behind, climbing through a shattered window. A woman on her knees among ruins, praying. A rocket cutting a bright scar through the air. “Ultimately,” Gold writes, “Dupont sees himself as an anti-war photographer, finding both the resilience people summon in the face of horror and the horrors themselves.”
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| Three may be a crowd, but two is a field — finally. After three months with the 2024 presidential race to himself, Donald Trump has a prominent Republican opponent, following Nikki Haley’s entrance into the race. Here’s what to know about the 2024 GOP primary (from POLITICO’s Scott Bland): - Haley won’t be daunted by her low standing in the early polls, given that she has come from behind to win her previous roles in elected office. Remind the skeptics that, in fact, she’s never lost an election before. - That track record and self-belief aren’t uncommon among presidential contenders. But they are unusual among presidential winners. Every elected president between Kennedy and Trump lost an election sometime in their career before winning the White House — formative experiences that shaped them as politicians and as people. - The official field of prominent GOP contenders stands at two, but plenty more are making early moves. Tim Scott is going to Iowa. Ron DeSantis is gathering donors for a major summit. The Mikes Pompeo and Pence are promoting memoirs. Every one of them has already been preparing for years, even if they aren’t officially running yet. - Be prepared for a drip-drip-drip of campaign announcements through the late spring or early summer — that’s about the time that primary debate season has started in the past. And every underdog will want to make sure they’re on that stage to land a chance at a big, campaign-defining moment.
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James Webb, the former head of NASA, has been accused of complicity in the Lavender Scare. But it’s not that simple, argues author Jamie Kirchick. | NASA | Don’t Cancel James Webb … Late last year, NASA announced that the James Webb Space Telescope would keep its name, despite criticism from some scientists who painted the former head of the administration as complicit in the Lavender Scare, a purge of gay employees from government roles that began in 1947. According to James Kirchick, author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, NASA made the right decision. “No matter how well-intentioned, to single out a bureaucrat like James Webb for the Lavender Scare would accomplish the opposite of what it intends by minimizing just how vast and ruthless was our country’s policy of anti-gay discrimination — a policy so vast and ruthless that it mandated the outlay of massive amounts of money and manpower in a whole-of-government effort aimed at firing patriotic and highly-educated employees just because of whom they loved,” he writes.
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argentogatto, ebay | The campaign of 2024 just kicked into a higher gear with Nikki Haley’s announcement on Wednesday, and somewhere on this planet, orders are almost certainly beginning to go out to factories to start cranking out campaign swag — bumper stickers, posters, straw hats, foam fingers — anything that can briefly hold the interest of voters in our overheated attention economy. The louder and brighter, the better. A hundred years ago, it was quieter. Sure, the campaign of 1924 also unleashed a torrent of campaign items — posters urging voters to “Keep Cool for Coolidge,” or to vote for his Democratic opponent, John W. Davis of West Virginia, or third-party candidate Robert La Follette. But it took a fair amount of persuading to get excited about Coolidge, who was famous for saying almost nothing (Walter Lippman wrote that he had “a genius for inactivity”). So perhaps it is appropriate that eBay is offering a modest souvenir of the last ’24 campaign, a very small object from a time when simple household objects spoke loudly. For a mere $14.99, you can be the proud owner of a Calvin Coolidge thimble.
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Regan Arts | Shaking Down Donald Trump … In his new book, Power: The 50 Truths, the influential Democratic political consultant Douglas Schoen shares 50 lessons learned from a high-powered career in politics. He recounts the time in the late ’80s when Donald Trump hired him to conduct a poll to forecast his chances of winning the presidency. (The results weren’t great: Trump didn’t have the name recognition he would later gain thanks to The Apprentice.) When the not-yet-but-future president neglected to cough up Schoen’s fee, he wasn’t about to become another schmuck holding a Trump IOU. He writes: Typically, as we now know, Trump did not pay me for the poll. The outstanding amount was the then not-inconsiderable sum of $80,000. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. One Friday, I had lunch with a friend at the Harvard Club — a place that is culturally about as far from Donald Trump as it is possible to be, but geographically lies just thirteen blocks from Trump Tower. As I was walking home up Fifth Avenue, I decided to go into Trump Tower and confront him. In those pre-9/11 days, there was little security. I just took the elevator to the 26th floor, brushed past the receptionist, and strode into his office, where he was sitting. He looked up, showing no surprise. He didn’t even ask what I was doing there unannounced. “Donald, you’ve got to pay,” I declared. He looked at me and gestured at a stack of papers standing about 18 inches high on his desk. “You see this pile?” he asked. “I’ve got all these invoices to pay. You want me to pull yours out?” I responded with what I thought was a quick and clever reply. “But, Donald, I only need one check.” Without fuss, he said, “That’s okay.” He wrote out a check and handed it to me, and I went straight out to the bank. | | | **Who Dissed answer: That would be President Obama, responding at the White House Correspondents Dinner to Bachmann’s claims that his policies on social issues and diplomatic ties to Israel were signs of the end times. politicoweekend@email.politico.com
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