The Playbook Podcast

Vice President JD Vance’s first six months in office have been an exercise in stealth. Yes, he has a very public role. But to understand how Trump’s Washington truly works, you need to pull back the curtain on how Vance has approached his job — and what that tells us both about the MAGA’s present and its future. Adam Wren and Dasha Burns go inside the inner workings of the Trump White House and share their reporting. Plus, President Donald Trump’s Scotland trip continues as he prepares for a meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is expected to press him on the spiraling humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary is getting lobbied by the MAHA movement to restrict food dyes and ultra-processed foods, as well as by the food, agriculture and pharmaceutical industries to reduce government oversight. 

“We want to go bold and there are a lot of things to do,” Makary tells POLITICO’s Dasha Burns. “But we also want to find common ground and work incrementally.”

At the same time, he says, “The amount of pressure I feel from industry or other branches of government is zero.” Makary also discusses how the agency is addressing women’s health and access to mifepristone, what he calls a “child vaping epidemic,” and explains the rationale behind FDA staffing cuts as well as some controversial hires. 

Plus, White House reporter Jake Traylor joins Burns to discuss the mood inside the White House amid the fallout over the Jeffrey Epstein story, why President Trump is “itching” to get back on the campaign trail ahead of the 2026 midterms and whether GOP candidates in swing districts will welcome him.

Today, even as President Donald Trump heads to Scotland, his attention lingers stateside — and maybe not for the reason you assume. Trump has fully invested himself into the coming midterms, with high stakes both for his political project and for himself. Looming over it all are the ghosts of 2018, when Trump’s Republicans lost the House and handed the gavel to a new Democratic majority that went to work stymying his agenda and launching investigations into his conduct. What did he learn from that experience and how is that shaping the outlook for the 2026 election? Adam Wren and POLITICO White House reporter Myah Ward break it all down.

It’s the biggest story in Washington: Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed President Donald Trump in May and told him that his name — among many others — appeared multiple times in the files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Now, the White House’s Epstein problem has grown into a full-blown crisis and entered a new and potentially more damaging phase. Playbook’s Adam Wren and Dasha Burns unpack it all — the spin, the lines of attack and what you need to know about where things head from here.

For more than two weeks, the Jeffrey Epstein saga has blotted out the sun in Washington. But it’s only now — with the House heading out for a monthlong recess as GOP leaders adjourn the chamber rather than allow a floor vote that would hasten the release of the Epstein files — that the storyline is threatening to break out of the bubble and follow congressional Republicans back to their districts, nudged along by gleeful Democrats. Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and chief correspondent Dasha Burns talk through what that might look like, the potential pitfalls for Democrats and Republicans and what President Donald Trump finds especially frustrating about the whole ordeal.

With no new enterprise journalism published recently on the “Epstein files” front, President Donald Trump’s allies are catching their breath. Democrats are riding what could be a sugar high, having already cost the House GOP some votes this week. But as the aperture widens, are Republicans actually finding themselves in better shape than conventional wisdom would suggest ahead of the 2026 midterms? Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and chief correspondent Dasha Burns talk through that and two other key questions just now coming into focus about 2026.

As the Epstein storm bears down on the White House, some of the same dynamics that contributed to the president’s rise to power now threaten his administration. Among them is the attention economy, which has utterly transformed American politics — and which Trump's innate grasp of helped him secure a second term. Now, with 2024 behind them, have Democrats fully absorbed one of the lessons of their defeat — and is the Epstein story an example of just how much things have changed? Playbook contributing author Adam Wren and chief correspondent Dasha Burns talk it through.

Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt is a lawyer, former state attorney general and a skilled navigator of the old — and new — wings of the Republican Party. He also has another title: White House whisperer. 

Schmitt joins POLITICO’s Dasha Burns to talk about his closeness with the Trump administration, driving the Senate’s $9.4 billion rescissions bill, his involvement with passing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” his belief in Medicaid reform, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files and what he describes as his “America First” — but not isolationist — foreign policy approach. 

“I think a slur that's often uttered is that it's an isolationist point of view,” Schmitt told Burns. “That's not true at all.”

(Note: This interview was conducted before the Senate and House passage of the rescissions bill.)

Plus, POLITICO reporter Ben Jacobs digs into his reporting on social media influencers running for office and how the phenomenon is reshaping electoral politics. 

Listen and subscribe to The Conversation with Dasha Burns on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The longtime friendship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein came in for a close-up in a much-anticipated Wall Street Journal report last night that detailed a long-ago “bawdy” birthday greeting the future president sent to the future convicted sex offender. Immediately, Washington was ablaze with chatter — about the reporting, about the White House’s response and about the story’s potential to reunite the deeply fractured MAGA movement that had recently seemed so divided over the administration’s handling of the Epstein files. POLITICO White House reporter Megan Messerly joins Playbook contributing author Adam Wren to walk through what we know and what to watch from here.

The Jeffrey Epstein news cycle is here to stay. And that’s increasingly frustrating President Donald Trump, who has grown accustomed to being able to exert control over the news cycle for much of the past decade. There’s a policy side to this, of course, as a number of prominent Republicans and MAGA figures are calling for a special counsel to investigate the files and the DOJ’s handling of them. But there’s also a pop cultural aspect to this, as the story has spilled over into the zeitgeist. Contributing author Adam Wren and chief Playbook correspondent Dasha Burns discuss how we got here and what comes next.