With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine

DRIVING THE DAY

Last night at the Washington Hilton, DONALD TRUMP addressed an audience that was rowdy — but not for the reasons he’s accustomed to.

They weren’t the MAGA faithful. Heck, they weren’t even Republicans. They were there for the Libertarian Party’s national convention. And many of them were decidedly not on board with the former president’s entreaties that they join with him to defeat President JOE BIDEN. By and large, they don’t see him as an ally to their cause.

And Trump didn’t exactly handle it diplomatically.

“Within minutes of beginning speaking — and after enduring sustained jeering and boos — the former president turned on the third party, mocking its poor electoral record in presidential elections even as he appealed to them for their endorsement,” write Brittany Gibson and Peder Schaefer.

“‘What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party … getting 3 percent?’ Trump asked the crowd, which proceeded to pelt him with jeers. ‘You should nominate Trump for president only if you want to win.’

“The libertarians in attendance didn’t want to hear it, as hecklers chucked insults at Trump all night. ‘Liar,’ they called him. ‘Panderer,’ they shouted. ‘You crushed our rights,’ they belted.”

Sure, there were a few moments of conciliation. Trump promised to appoint a Libertarian to the Cabinet, and pledged to commute the sentence of ROSS ULBRICHT, the creator of Silk Road, the notorious online illicit market, as Semafor’s David Weigel notes.

But all in all, it was a chaotic scene with more boos than a Halloween corn maze.

So why is Trump world spinning it as a success?

“So in the same week, President Trump goes to the bright-blue Bronx and another political party’s convention, a week before that he goes to bright-blue Minnesota, and before that, he has stops at the Teamsters headquarters and SneakerCon and even a town hall on CNN during the Republican primary,” Trump adviser JASON MILLER texted us this morning. “What’s now clear is that President Trump is changing the game and living in what normally would be considered Joe Biden’s political territory, and this has to terrify Democrats.”

“President Trump … is unafraid to take his message to every corner of this country, from the deep blue Bronx to the Libertarian Convention,” posted KAROLINE LEAVITT, the Trump camp’s press secretary. “Joe Biden is a shell of a man, too afraid to debate in front of a small audience.”

Biden world is nonplussed. “Every day, Donald Trump’s campaign shows that they do not have the ability or desire to build a coalition that gets him to 270 electoral votes,” a Biden adviser told Playbook on the phone this morning. “To go to the Libertarian convention while Donald Trump is the one responsible for ripping away a bunch of freedoms and trying to gaslight Libertarians into thinking that he is their person? It’s a joke. It would be funny if it wasn’t so deeply serious this election.”

Responding directly to Miller’s statement, they dug in: “If the Trump campaign wants to spend their time competing in states that they are going to lose by 15 percentage points, by all means, they’re more than welcome to do that.” (We’d just note: If Trump can peel off a few votes on the margins here and there, that adds up very quickly!)

Let’s put the spin aside. Here’s what’s going on.

The Trump camp’s thinking is this: By making unorthodox, attention-grabbing campaign stops — including in what would normally be considered “enemy” territory — it bets that it can draw a contrast with Biden’s relatively placid, unremarkable campaign schedule. By doing that, they aim to underscore their central argument that Biden is weak both personally and politically.

But here’s the thing: It’s a strategy that risks backfiring by putting Trump front and center. And that’s what Biden world believes will win the president reelection.

Whoever’s on the right side of that coin flip will likely win the election.

Biden’s camp believes its biggest structural problem is “that the race does not yet sufficiently revolve around Trump,” and that once voters grapple with that reality, “they’ll remember all the reasons they sent Trump packing four years ago,” as NYT Mag’s Jason Zengerle writes this morning in a sharp piece on the challenge of messaging against Trump.

But when might that change happen? “For a time, it seemed Biden thought that Trump’s clinching the Republican nomination, which he did in March, would cause voters to focus on the former president. Then the hope appeared to be that Trump’s having to show up in a New York City courtroom, and the resulting media frenzy, would bring his opponent to the front of voters’ minds. Neither really did the trick. Now the Biden campaign is trying to take matters into its own hands.”

One implicit question: Is the Biden camp introspective enough to wonder if, at some point, the cause of their anemic poll results isn’t a lack of public focus on the man they’re up against?

SOMETHING THAT COULD TURN UP PUBLIC ATTENTION — This week, jurors in Trump’s business fraud/hush money trial in Manhattan will begin their deliberations in what is likely to be the only Trump prosecution that will be decided — or even reach trial — before Election Day.

The outcome will set the backdrop for a hot summer of presidential politics.

A guilty verdict “would be an ignominious first for a former president, threatening Trump’s standing with some voters and handing President Biden new ammunition to portray his rival as unfit for office,” as WSJ’s Alex Leary and Corinne Ramey write in their new look at potential fallout. “An acquittal — or even a hung jury — could be a career-defining moment for Trump, who likely would cast himself as having vanquished an improper political prosecution. … [It] could give Trump new political momentum.”

Biden’s team has told reporters it’s ready for Trump to get back on the campaign trail — that his increased visibility will make it easier for them to draw the contrast.

“If the jury convicts Trump, Biden’s team will then argue that the result shows Trump is ill-suited for office and that it demonstrates the extremes to which the former president would go to win again,” write Leary and Ramey. “The campaign’s social media team is considering leveraging the line of attack further, with discussions underway about referring to the ex-president online as ‘Convicted Felon Donald Trump.’”

Biden, who has mostly stayed away from the Trump trials (except for the quick trolling jab here or there), is likely to make some kind of address at the White House after the verdict, our colleague Jonathan Lemire reported on Friday evening.

Good Sunday morning. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.

TRENDWATCH — “Even as Violent Crime Drops, Lawlessness Rises as an Election Issue,” by NYT’s Glenn Thrush … “Criminal justice backlash heads to the California ballot,” by Jeremy White

SUNDAY BEST …

— Rep. JARED MOSKOWITZ (D-Fla.) on the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, on “Fox News Sunday”: “This is totally political. The ICC is irrelevant. They have no jurisdiction. We might as well call them the ‘Harry Potter Ministry of Magic.’ They’re irrelevant because Israel is not a party to their treaty. And so this is pressure, unfortunately, from the international community that wants to see no more Israel.”

— Rep. BYRON DONALDS (R-Fla.) on Trump and abortion, on “Fox News Sunday”: “When it comes to something as personal as abortion at this point, you know, the president’s position is, the philosophies of people in the states needs to be what governs — not federal law, definitely not the Supreme Court.”

— “Tim Scott deflects on Trump’s ‘locked and loaded’ comment,” by Mia McCarthy: “The potential VP pick avoided answering whether he thought Trump’s false statements were dangerous.”

— Former Rep. PATRICK KENNEDY (D-R.I.) on addiction and Congress, on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “When I was in Congress and I had just had a DWI, I went to treatment. I came back, and I started having colleagues of mine in Congress stop me and tell me their own stories. And it was interesting because I was the only one that they knew had addiction problems. And what I realized is that all of us are walking through hallways not realizing how many of the rest of us are silently suffering.”

TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.

• “The Dangers of an Ungovernable Gaza,” by Dana Stroul for Foreign Affairs
• “There’s No Sense of Shame at the Supreme Court,” by Jesse Wegman for the NYT
• “The failures of Zionism and anti-Zionism,” by Matthew Yglesias for Slow Boring
• “Reaganomics Is on Its Last Legs,” by Rogé Karma for The Atlantic
• “The Trump Trial’s Great Anticlimax,” by Michelle Goldberg for the NYT
• “A second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the news media,” by Leonard Downie Jr. for WaPo
• “Why not shake up America’s national holidays?” by Daniel Pink for WaPo
• “How Corporate Money Threatens Academic Freedom,” by Joan Donovan for the Harvard Crimson
• “Jasmine Crockett Is the Campaign Surrogate Biden Needs,” by Nia-Malika Henderson for Bloomberg
• “I Carried Out the Strike That Killed Soleimani. America Doesn't Understand the Lesson of His Death,” by Kenneth McKenzie Jr. for The Atlantic
• “How RFK Jr. and Shanahan help deliver false hope to parents of children with autism,” by Catherine Tan for CNN
• “Trump’s Money Problems Are Becoming a Crisis for the Entire Country,” by David Graham for The Atlantic
• “The ‘Trump-Oprah’ Voter,” by Kristen Soltis Anderson for the NYT
• “When America was ‘great,’ according to data,” by Andrew Van Dam for WaPo

WHAT'S HAPPENING TODAY

At the White House

Biden and first lady JILL BIDEN will return to the White House from Wilmington, Delaware, in the evening.

VP KAMALA HARRIS has nothing on her public schedule.

PLAYBOOK READS

9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR

1. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: After CIA Director WILLIAM BURNS went to Europe for talks, the prospects for cease-fire negotiations to restart in the Israel-Hamas war grew a bit brighter: Reuters’ Nidal Al-Mughrabi reports that they’re expected to kick off again within the next week, though there’s already been some squabbling over the timeline.

On the ground: Meanwhile, Israeli attacks reportedly killed more than 40 Palestinians across Gaza yesterday. And Hamas today fired a barrage of rockets, making sirens go off in places like Tel Aviv for the first time in months. The Biden administration finds itself increasingly isolated — both from an international community that is condemning Israel’s Rafah incursion, as WaPo’s Karen DeYoung writes, and from Israeli PM BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, whose strategy over the past couple of decades of aligning closely with Republicans has helped undermine bipartisan U.S. support for Israel, as WaPo’s Yasmeen Abutaleb, Steve Hendrix and Tyler Pager chronicle.

The aid question: The U.S. effort to get humanitarian aid into Gaza from the sea hit a snag today as rough waters sent multiple Army vessels off course, Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing reports. That’s just the latest difficulty in the overall “sluggish start” for the $320 million floating pier, which in its first week of operation supplied only “about 15% of the estimated minimum daily need” for Gaza, WSJ’s Stephen Kalin and Nancy Youssef report.

2. ON THE AIRWAVES: “Trump TV: Internet broadcaster beams the ex-president’s message directly to his MAGA faithful,” by AP’s Richard Lardner and Bill Barrow in Opelika, Alabama: “In less than a decade, [Right Side Broadcasting Network] has gone from an upstart internet broadcaster to a major player in Trump’s MAGA universe, amassing more than 2 million subscribers on its YouTube channel and on Rumble, an alternative video-sharing platform. … And it all started when a freelance website designer with zero media experience had a brainstorm: There was a big audience for Trump TV.”

3. BATTLE FOR THE SENATE: One major X-factor in the Montana Senate race is a big influx of newcomers from out of state who have arrived since the pandemic began — which is also to say, since the last time Democratic Sen. JON TESTER was up for reelection, NYT’s Kellen Browning reports from Bozeman. Many of the new arrivals are from blue states, but they could just as easily be conservatives looking for a more right-leaning home. (The state’s lack of party voter registration keeps us in the dark.) Just as impactful as their votes: the political angst that has sprung up around their arrival. The “affordability crisis and a local backlash … are transforming the state’s economy and politics.”

4. TWO PRIMARIES TO WATCH: On Tuesday, Rep. TONY GONZALES (R-Texas) will face a strong runoff challenge on his right from BRANDON HERRERA. MAGA criticism of Gonzales was particularly sharp over his votes for bipartisan gun safety and immigration bills. But he tells CNN’s Manu Raju and Shania Shelton that he hopes his victory would send a message to the GOP about being a party of governance rather than one of “jesters.” And he’s ready for some payback: If he wins, Gonzales indicated that he plans to return a favor and go campaign against Reps. BOB GOOD (R-Va.) and MATT GAETZ (R-Fla.) in their districts.

And Rep. ROB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.) is also staring down a tough threat to reelection in his June primary, as the legal woes of his father, Sen. BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.), hang like a storm cloud, NYT’s Nicholas Fandos and Tracey Tully report. The younger Menendez isn’t involved in his father’s corruption trial. But Hoboken Mayor RAVI BHALLA “has turned the Democrat-on-Democrat race into a referendum on the Menendez family and on New Jersey’s machine-style politics.” Right now it looks like a dead heat, and Menendez’s allies are worried.

5. VEEPSTAKES: “Hill GOP urges Trump to consider an establishment running mate — maybe even Haley,” by Olivia Beavers, Ursula Perano and Burgess Everett: “Trump is getting clear advice from a sizable number of Hill Republicans, even some MAGA loyalists: Pick a running mate who can attract more wary GOP voters on the center-right. … [If NIKKI] HALEY can’t make an improbable comeback, many Republican lawmakers want to see Trump pick one of two other former opponents with the same outside-of-MAGA allure: Sens. TIM SCOTT (R-S.C.) or MARCO RUBIO (R-Fla.).”

6. THE NEW JOHN FETTERMAN: NYT’s Annie Karni takes a look at the changes in the Pennsylvania Democratic senator, who has surprised and angered the left not only over Israel but on a number of issues lately, where his quirky iconoclasm has lately taken the shape of bucking party orthodoxy. It’s not just policy stances: Fetterman “has begun to express himself in more caustic, sometimes hostile ways.” And though his office has seen relatively low turnover, a number of his most senior and highest-profile aides have left in recent months.

What’s behind the transformation: “Former staff members and supporters suggest there is more at play, both personally and politically. Mr. Fetterman, who swore off social media, and news in general, after his hospitalization for depression, for a time relied on staff to curate a package of clips that kept him up to speed on what he needed to know. But his return to work and sharp break with the left has coincided with a distinct shift to the right in his media diet; he sometimes appears sucked into a vortex dominated by social media, The New York Post and Fox News, where for the first time in his political career, he is receiving approving coverage.

“Those who have worked with Mr. Fetterman also suggest that his transformation may be calculated, and that he is carving out what he thinks is a more sustainable and winning lane for himself as a Democrat.”

And yet: “Despite all of his rhetoric, Mr. Fetterman so far has voted like a reliable Democratic foot soldier.”

7. JUST LIKE A HEATWAVE: As the world warms, lethal heat on the job is killing a growing number of Americans at work. Now, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is working on a forthcoming rule that would force new safeguards from extreme temperatures — “the first major federal government regulation to protect Americans from heat on the job,” NYT’s Coral Davenport and Noah Weiland report. But it could run into headwinds from industry groups that will oppose more mandated breaks, water and air conditioning. And “even if the rule takes effect, experts say, the government’s emergency response system is poorly suited to meet the urgency of the moment.”

8. WHAT WENT WRONG: “‘Never Been Done Before’: A True Investigation of a Failed American War,” by Nahal Toosi: “If you played a role in Afghanistan policy over the past few decades, be prepared for a call. In their first joint interview since the launch of the Afghanistan War Commission, co-chairs and veteran Afghan policy thinkers SHAMILA CHAUDHARY and COLIN JACKSON discussed their move into an active new phase, including interviewing the diplomats, generals and politicians who shaped the war. Their goal? To determine just what went wrong in the 20-year conflict.”

9. BEYOND THE BELTWAY: “School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close,” by Andrew Atterbury: “Gov. RON DeSANTIS and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling. Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.”

PLAYBOOKERS

Joe Biden urged cadets to safeguard democracy in his West Point commencement speech.

El Nini, a Mexican cartel leader, has been extradited to the U.S.

Mark Robinson fired up the North Carolina GOP convention.

Donald Trump met Afroman.

OUT AND ABOUT — Marcia Fudge was honored with the Beth Newburger Schwartz Award at Arena Stage’s 2024 gala on Wednesday, a Gilded Age-themed celebration that welcomed Hana Sharif as the theater’s artistic director. Alethia Jackson and Nick Goad co-chaired and Symone Sanders-Townsend emceed the evening, which also included a musical performance by Patina Miller and a paddle auction. SPOTTED: Edgar Dobie, Michael Steele, Shawn Townsend, Ashley Davis and Beverly Perry.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD — Lauren Hunter, VP at Cornerstone Government Affairs, and Jesse Hunter, senior project manager at HITT Contracting, welcomed Charles Outland Hunter on May 1. He joins big siblings Henry Everett and Eleanor Louise. Pic

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) (8-0) … Keenan Austin Reed … POLITICO’s Aurora Calderone, Brenda Cruz, Thejaswini Somegowda, Steven Stiles, Jackie Padilla, Rebecca Haase, Bria Cook and Jennifer Rizzo … Vox’s Noel King … Andrew Beilein … Mike Harney … NBC’s Tom Ranzweiler … Matt Keelen … Miriam Cash … ClearPath’s Chris Tomassi … Morgan Jacobs … Allison Davis Tuck … Hana Vizcarra … Dina Ellis Rochkind … former Reps. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.) and Rich Nugent (R-Fla.) … Katie Wise … Jonathan Dach … Adam Rapfogel

Send Playbookers tips to [email protected] or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.