Today’s notice: Moderates grapple with MAGA’s winning percentage. Visiting Tom Kean Jr.’s house. Republicans want more changes after Trump’s military drawdown is paused. Mifepristone opponents are not celebrating. And: Kari Lake’s side hustles.

THE LATEST

Moderate Republicans’ time in the barrel: Public polls have found that general election voters are not happy with the president and are looking for alternatives to White House policies on the war with Iran and allocating taxpayer funds for the proposed ballroom, to name just two. But what exactly is a Republican who needs some distance from Donald Trump supposed to do now?

NOTUS’ Stephen Neukam, Em Luetkemeyer and Reese Gorman performed a vibe check on Capitol Hill after Rep. Thomas Massie’s sound defeat at the hands of MAGA. Lawmakers had a variety of responses:

1. Standing their ground. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick actually took some fire from POTUS, who chastised his MAGA skepticism even as the Pennsylvania Republican battles to hold on to his crucial swing seat. Fitzpatrick projected what, me worry? to reporters. “It’s not going to chill any voting activity for me,” he said of Massie’s defeat and Trump’s attacks.

2. Massie did it to himself. The theory here is that Massie got too big for his britches and that’s what caused Republican voters to be turned off. “Massie chose to be adversarial, not only with the president but with the conference, his party, and the voters rejected him,” Rep. Mike Lawler said. His read on what happened: Massie “tried to make this whole election about Israel and Jews, and got smoked.”

3. What’s the problem? Speaker Mike Johnson said the lesson from Massie’s race is to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. “The president has the strongest endorsement in the history of politics … but we don’t demand loyalty to the president,” Johnson said. “What I demand as speaker of the House is loyalty to our core principles.”

An outstanding question: Does Trump determine what those principles are? Or someone else?

Open tabs: Ally of DOJ pardon attorney seeks to join board of Trump’s $1.7+ billion fund (CBS); Trump officials say they can build 250-foot arch without Congress’s approval (WaPo); Five Republican senators back Letlow in bid to sew up Louisiana runoff (Semafor); House Passes Housing Reform After Trump’s Blessing (NOTUS)

From New Jersey

Missing in action: Rep. Tom Kean Jr. hasn’t cast a vote since March 5, and GOP leadership hasn’t heard from him in weeks. In the New Jersey Republican’s affluent Westfield community, NOTUS’ Jose Pagliery visited Kean’s house twice in two days and learned from neighbors that it has been dark for weeks.

An F-150 parked outside “was doused in a layer of yellow pollen,” Jose writes, suggesting it has not moved in a long time. On the second visit, he approached Rhonda Kean, the congressman’s wife, after she pulled up in her car. She told him “no comment” on her husband’s condition.

The message from Kean’s team: The congressman is “dealing with a personal medical situation and is under the care of doctors. The expectation is that he is going to be 100% and totally healthy. The timeline for that looks very good.”

From the Hill

Hawks squawk: House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers said Hill Republicans will continue the push to limit the Trump administration’s power to draw down U.S. forces in Europe, even after they successfully pressured the White House to back off plans to cancel a deployment to Poland, NOTUS’ Joe Gould reports.

Watch this space: “Tougher guardrails that I’m not going to talk about publicly” on Europe troop moves are “under development” for the next must-pass defense policy bill, Rogers said.

From the White House

Abortion pill opponents lower their expectations: Vocal opponents of abortion have not been feeling the love from this White House for a while now, and NOTUS’ Oriana González and Paige Winfield Cunningham report that they have not been heartened by the appointment of Kyle Diamantas as acting Food and Drug Administration commissioner. Anti-abortion groups want the agency to get a long-promised review of the abortion pill mifepristone done in the hopes that it will be ruled unsafe.

Diamantas’ past employment at a law firm that had Planned Parenthood as a client (he says he asked to be removed from the case) has not inspired anti-abortion groups, nor are many convinced by a review of the status of the actual review that Diamantas has promised. They just don’t know what to believe anymore, despite Trump’s part in facilitating their biggest policy win in ages: the end of Roe v. Wade.

“There is no Donald Trump whisperer from within the pro-life movement,” Tom McClusky, a veteran movement lobbyist, told NOTUS.

NEW ON NOTUS

Mixed-media moonlighting: Trump’s pick for ambassador to Jamaica, Kari Lake, raked in tens of thousands of dollars from media side hustles while she served as de facto leader of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Lake, who’s run two unsuccessful political campaigns in Arizona, made a minimum of $42,000 from royalties — though monetizing her X profile with 3.1 million followers accounted for almost half that total, NOTUS’ Adora Brown reports.

Take a listen: Lake’s 2023 song “81 Million Votes, My Ass,” mocking the 2020 presidential election’s results, reportedly earned her $200 or less in royalties.

The anti-fraud leader with skin in the game: The White House is willing to overlook what it deems a “not so substantial” financial conflict of interest for the deputy director of its anti-fraud task force, Jetson Leder-Luis. His wife owned a projected $237,558 in unvested restricted stock units in Amazon.com, a major government contractor that Leder-Luis could potentially review. But despite this apparent conflict of interest, White House counsel David Warrington issued Leder-Luis a waiver so he can continue rooting out alleged abuse in federal benefits programs, NOTUS’ Dave Levinthal reports.

More: Lawmakers Won’t Bet on Online Gambling Regulation Moving This Year, by Torrence Banks

Ex-Prosecutor Stole Jack Smith Report Using Dessert Recipe Misdirection, Feds Say, by Adora Brown

NOT US

• Trump’s PAC Men, by Leigh Ann Caldwell for Puck
  
• Gun rights groups see ‘golden age’ under Trump administration, by Jaclyn Diaz for NPR
  
• Inside the next phase of OpenAI’s political strategy, by Brendan Bordelon for Politico

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