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Photos by Robyn Twomey for POLITICO; Illustrations by Janelle Barone for POLITICO | They’ve flipped districts and reshaped the law. Inspired hundreds of thousands of fans — and critics. Won seats in Congress, governor’s mansions and the White House. This is the Recast Power List: Forty heavy-hitters — from Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to Twitter CEO Elon Musk; from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to musician Bad Bunny — who shaped the intersection of race, identity, culture, politics and policy in 2022. They come from different party affiliations, races, gender identities and political ideologies, but share one thing in common: The ability to send American politics in a new direction. Read the story. | | | | 
| “I would bring the lunch to the White House. I would make it soft food if that’s what he wants. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it takes to meet.” Can you guess who said this about President Biden this week? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by Getty Images, iStock | The President and the Porn Star … It’s official: Donald Trump is the first former president to be indicted on criminal charges. To make sense of what’s to come amid the deluge of takes, we turned to two incisive legal writers. Let’s be clear: When Trump’s supporters say that these charges would never have been brought against anyone else, they’re correct, writes former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori. So what? That’s not going to work as a defense. As for the case, it’s a weak one, writes legal affairs columnist Renato Mariotti. But even if he beats the charges, they’ll make it harder for him to defend against future indictments — over, say, efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Or retaining classified documents. Or the events of January 6. “I’ve defended clients who face charges in multiple jurisdictions at the same time, and it’s a challenge,” Mariotti writes. “One might think that each case stands on its own merits, but in reality there is a multiplier effect that works against defendants.”
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Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport, on March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas. | Nathan Howard/AP Photo | How Trump Wins … You could say Trump’s campaign against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the oh-come-on-already candidate who still hasn’t formally announced, is going well. His usual M.O. of insults, rallies and social media rumpusing have corresponded with a widening lead over the younger challenger. But this isn’t 2016. Trump needs a new strategy for challenging DeSantis — something better than “Meatball Ron.” Luckily for the former president, Jack Shafer has some advice: “As the pseudo-incumbent president, Trump must never allow the DeSantis name to pass through his lips,” Shafer writes. “By starving his opponent of equal billing, Trump could turn DeSantis into a no-name nobody unworthy of consideration.”
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| It happened! After years of prosecutors circling Donald Trump, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg indicted the former president. Here are some tips to help you sound like a seasoned legal insider. (From Ankush Khardori.) — Talk about how weird it is that this news is somehow both shocking and also seems to have been inevitable. For years, Trump has attracted the attention of criminal investigators and had so far managed to elude any charges, but someone finally got their hooks in him. — When people say that the case isn’t a slam dunk, tell them that no interesting criminal case is, and this one is as interesting as it gets. — Toss out some of the issues that may complicate the DA’s case. Here’s one: Michael Cohen is a key witness, and he’s far from a model of what you want from a cooperating witness in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president. — Push back on the lazy conventional wisdom that this should not have been the first case against Trump. If anyone is angry about it, they should take it up with Merrick Garland.
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In the movies, John Wick is impossibly stylish and impossibly skillful at killing. | Murray Close/Lionsgate | We’re Living in John Wick’s America … We can’t blame you for gluing your eyes to the inimitable Keanu Reeves as he beat up bad guys on a neon-lit dance floor in the new John Wick movie. But from a political standpoint, all the gyrating extras were just as interesting. As thugs came at Reeves’ titular assassin wielding axes, they crowd didn’t scream or cry or run for cover; they just kept dancing. Is there any clearer metaphor for a country that can’t seem to come up with a serious response to wanton violence, like the school shooting in Nashville that ended six lives and changed countless others earlier this week? The Wick franchise’s “evocation of a world in which death lurks around every corner and we don’t care so long as it’s not happening to us rings eerily true,” writes Emily St. James. “Even if the world is ending, so many of us would rather keep dancing.” | | | | 
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Political raconteurs long assumed that William F. Buckley Jr. was his movement’s de facto boundary enforcer, keeping true conservatism clean and free of its seedier aspects. But the lines between mainstream and fringe were murkier than these portraits suggest. | David Pickoff/AP Photo | The Truth About Buckley and the Birchers … There’s a version of the story that goes something like this: In the late ’50s and ’60s, the far-right John Birch Society and its wackadoo ideas — Dwight D. Eisenhower is a communist! — presented a threat to the conservative movement’s legitimacy, so William F. Buckley, the erudite founder of the National Review, took the Birchers to task in editorials, helping banish them to the fringe. But in his new book, Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, historian Matthew Dallek argues the myth is more muddled than that. In fact, National Review editors fretted over how to criticize batty Bircher leaders like Robert Welch without alienating the society’s base — which included Buckley’s own mother.
| | | **Who Dissed answer: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made the comment about Biden’s age, saying he hoped to meet with the president to discuss raising the debt ceiling. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to the swipe: “I think the president is able to pick out his own Starbucks. … What we really need from Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans is to see their budget.” politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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