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Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is going to play a very prominent role in his presidential campaign. Some of his supporters wonder if that’s an entirely good thing. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for POLITICO | | There’s a not-so-secret weapon in the about-to-be-announced presidential campaign of Florida Gov Ron DeSantis: Casey, his wife. Among the conservative superfans of former President Donald Trump’s closest primary rival, she’s seen as a superstar of a political spouse, whose charm and commanding stage presence smooth over her husband’s often awkward, even robotic manner. And she’s not just a talented media presence. Casey DeSantis plays an uncommonly hands-on role in her husband’s political project. “She is every bit as involved in Ron’s rise as Ron is himself,” says David Jolly, the ex-GOP Florida congressperson and current MSNBC analyst. “Unlike any first lady in my extended memory,” adds Tallahassee fixture Mac Stipanovich. But some who have worked with Florida’s first lady say her deep involvement in DeSantis’ work hasn’t all been so sparkly. DeSantis is a famously guarded man, with few friends and an inner circle that hardly expands beyond his immediate family — not just because he doesn’t trust anyone, but because Casey doesn’t either. “She’s the power behind the throne,” according to one Republican lobbyist. “The tip of the spear,” says a Republican consultant. She’s in the middle of DeSantis’ best decisions — but also his worst ones, like the ouster of Trump kingmaker Suzie Wiles, whose return to working for Trump after a falling out with DeSantisland could prove fatal for his aspirations in 2024. “Have you ever noticed,” Roger Stone, the notorious political mischief-maker who is both a DeSantis antagonist and a many-decades-long Trump loyalist, remarked in a Telegram post last fall, “how much Ron DeSantis’ wife Casey is like Lady Macbeth?” But to Michael Kruse, who’s spent years reporting on DeSantis, Casey is neither the fawning caricature presented in conservative media nor a Shakespearean villain. “She might well be a bit of both, say even some DeSantis proponents, and somewhere in this tension sits the central dynamic of the pending DeSantis campaign,” he writes. “She can ameliorate some of the effects of his idiosyncrasies. She can also accentuate, even exacerbate, his hubris, and his paranoia, and his vaulting ambition — because those are all traits that they share. He wouldn’t be where he is without her. He might not get to where he wants to go because of her.” Read the story.
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| “Let me tell you something, Jamaal, you’re not very smart, you should pay attention.” Can you guess who said this to Democratic Rep. Jamaal Bowman this week? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.** | | | |  | | 
Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally at Waco Regional Airport on March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas. | Nathan Howard/AP Photo | Post-Trump Reforms? Guess Not … 2020 seemed like a year of lessons learned. With Trump out of office, the Beltway’s ethicists, legal nerds and broader commentariat rushed to propose stopgaps for each and every hole he’d punched in the executive branch’s hull: A reporting requirement for campaign contacts with foreign governments. A ban on presidential participation in a business interest. Mandatory release of candidates’ tax returns. But three years later, notes Michael Schaffer in this week's Capital City column, the list of enacted reforms is a short one — and with polls indicating that the “after Trump” era may turn out to be a “between Trump” interim, advocates are pointing fingers at Congress and the White House.
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| Can the leaders of seven countries tackle the world’s problems in one weekend, from the war in Ukraine to the potential (and danger) of AI? No, but they can talk about them at the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, starting today. Not on your way to the summit yourself? Not to worry — these talking points will impress the foreign policy fanatic in your life. (From POLITICO’s Kelly Garrity) — One thing to watch out for, you’ll tell your friends, is whether the U.S. can land some tricky sanctions gymnastics to create a de-facto ban on G-7 exports to Russia. — Catch countries cozying up with leaders from the Cook Islands and some southeast Asian countries like Vietnam and Indonesia as the wealthy Western nations look to shore up alliances near China. — Hope and pray that Congress solves its debt ceiling deadlock and avoids global economic collapse while Biden is out of town on the world stage. — But don’t mention the public holiday that was scheduled for Biden’s (now canceled) trip to Papua New Guinea — it’s a sore subject.
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POLITICO illustration/Photos by Getty, AP | They Love Trump, They Love Trump Not … Michael Cohen said he’d take a bullet for him. Then he said he was a fraud. Ted Cruz called him a serial philanderer. Then he said he’d support him anyway. And Nikki Haley has ping-ponged so many times — pro-Trump, anti-Trump, pro-, anti-, pro- again — that it’ll nearly give you whiplash to read her quotes on the former president. And she’s far from alone. Conservative figures from Lindsey Graham to Azealia Banks seem to love nothing more than flip-flopping on Trump — and most of the time, he’s more than willing to return the favor. So POLITICO Magazine gathered up the most spectacular reversals and re-reversals Trump has inspired — a collection of quotes that make the word “trust” nearly meaningless and speak to the constantly shifting alliances of the chaotic political world Trump remade in his image.
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POLITICO illustration/Photo by iStock | The Shadow Docket Crisis … The Supreme Court has incendiary rulings to make on highly combustible topics like affirmative action, climate policy and, well, democracy itself. But according to a new book by University of Texas Law School professor Stephen Vladeck, it’s not just the court’s high-profile decisions that deserve scrutiny — it’s everything else. The “shadow docket” — that vast majority of cases the court considers outside of public view, issuing decisions with no explanation, so deal with it — is nothing new. But it changed drastically during the Trump administration, Vladeck argues, with the court’s conservative majority dashing off highly controversial decisions, often in the middle of the night, to greenlight Trump’s policies without justification. And particularly as justices come under heightened scrutiny over potential ethics violations, that lack of transparency calls the court’s already tarnished credibility into question. “It’s emblematic of the deeper problem, which is the court’s notion that, Our docket is up to us, our ethics are up to us, our decision-making is up to us,” Vladeck tells Ian Ward.
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Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at CPAC 2023, Friday, March 3, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. | Alex Brandon/AP Photo | How to Beat Trump and Biden, According to Andrew Yang … Vivek Ramaswamy, the 37-year-old tech-savvy political outsider making a surprising impact on the GOP primary, has been compared to another business-minded techie who shook up an election: Andrew Yang. And it turns out that the former 2020 contender and co-chair of the Forward Party sees the resemblance himself — and he has nine specific tips for how Ramaswamy could stand out among the growing crowd of would-be Trump usurpers. “If you follow these points, you will maximize your chances to represent the GOP in the 2024 election,” Yang writes. “It will be an uphill climb. But hey, worst case, after the campaign you can come join me in the Forward Party.”
| | | **Who Dissed answer: Who else but Rep. MTG? The two lawmakers got into a meandering screaming match outside the Capitol on Wednesday, after House Republicans voted to punt on the effort to expel the ever-scandalous Republican Rep. George Santos. Bowman and Greene had touched on QAnon, immigration, gun policy and more before breaking it up, at which point Rep. AOC stepped in: “She ain’t worth it, bro,” she told Bowman. politicoweekend@email.politico.com
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