Ron DeSantis is struggling in the polls, and at acting like a human being in public. The Murdochs are losing patience with his flailing efforts to become the alt-Trump for voters exhausted by MAGA. He’s getting a lot of negative headlines now that his Republican-dominated state legislature back home has ended its legislative session and is therefore no longer producing anti-woke bills for him to sign into law and pump into Fox’s news cycle.

So naturally he’s turning to a key voting bloc that — at times reluctantly — got behind Donald Trump in droves in 2016 to propel him to the White House: white evangelicals. It’s an intrinsic shift for any Republican but especially for one who is banking his entire 2024 bid on what he perceives to be his unique ability to scoop up disaffected Trump voters looking for an alternative to the former president’s various disagreeable features.

There are two new reports out this week that dig in on where Rupert Murdoch is leaning ahead of the 2024 Republican primary, as he creates distance between his conservative media empire and Donald Trump, whose 2020 election lies have already cost Murdoch’s Fox News three-quarters of a billionaire dollars in just one defamation suit settlement. Murdoch reportedly is doing whatever he can to avoid being “stuck” with Trump again in 2024, privately expressing repeatedly over the last two years that he thinks Trump is unhealthy for the Republican Party, according to the New York Times.

Republicans are continuing to backtrack on years of conspiracy-theory precedent after last year’s midterms taught them that demonizing certain popular types of voting for the sake of Donald Trump’s grievances might not be the best way to win friends and influence people.

The latest MAGA fan and one-time Big Liar to embrace the Republican National Committee’s early-voting about-face initiative: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

QAnon congresswoman-turned-GOP House leadership darling Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) membership with the House Freedom Caucus has been in question ever since she laid down her life/remaining dignity to back House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in his speakership race. Since then, she’s been picking fights and at odds with members of the rebellious faction for being too tight with the establishment crowd.

While there’s been speculation for weeks that the Georgia congresswoman may soon get the boot from the fringe group, it turns out that the Freedom Caucus has actually already voted to punish Greene for forgetting where she came from.

Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed the Arizona secretary of state’s office as recently as May for information related to the unsuccessful lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and the Arizona Republican Party about supposed errors in the 2020 election. As you’ll recall, Arizona was a hotbed of conspiracy theories tied to the effort to overturn the election after President Biden flipped the longtime Republican stronghold state, leading to Trumpworld outrage, a phony and expensive state election “audit” and the lawsuits.

The Washington Post published a piece this weekend on the ways in which moderate Republicans in the House are getting sick of the far-right Freedom Caucus’ ongoing revolt as its members flex their power over House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), pushing increasingly extreme and sometimes bizarre messaging bills that will harm those in swing districts in 2024. There’s an interesting nugget of reporting tucked into the piece that touches on the trend we’ve seen since Roe was overturned: Republicans are seeing the writing on the wall with abortion and it’s not looking pretty.

There is a ballot initiative on track to go before New York voters next fall that, if approved, would codify abortion access and several other things, including LGBTQ rights, into the state constitution. While it is jarring to imagine a world in which such a protection would be necessary in very blue New York, it falls in line with efforts in other blue and purple — and even some red — states post-Dobbs, as the rogue Supreme Court signals that other privacy-related rights may also be at risk.

But New York Democrats are also taking political lessons from other states that have witnessed the energizing power of abortion for the party in elections since Roe’s overturning and are viewing the ballot measure as a tool to boost Democrats’ chances of retaking the House.

The oversaturation strategy continues.

Donald Trump is leaning in hard on the classics to deflect responsibility for the charges against him in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and especially so in the wake of new, seemingly incriminating tapes of him admitting to aspects of the charges he currently faces. His latest remarks to Fox News are a pivot back to a vintage yet reliable genre of Trumpism, using “stable genius” energy and “fake news” schoolyard bullying to shrug off the fact that the audio recording CNN published this week features him admitting he shouldn’t have the classified documents he’s flinging around for all to see.

As my colleague David Kurtz unpacked in today’s Morning Memo, there’ve been reports in the last few days that suggest that special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the 2020 election and Jan. 6 is very much alive and well post-Mar-a-Lago indictment — including reports of some key immunity deals.