The future of American conservatism will be ironed out at the RNC in Milwaukee next week, and one young Latino you’ve probably never heard of will be playing his part in making that future more diverse — and even more MAGA.

At just 23, Hilario Deleon is the chair of the Republican Party in the county where the convention will be held. A Trump mega-fan since the infamous escalator descent — which went down during his last month in middle school — Deleon believes the 2020 election was “stolen,” that antifa exacerbated Jan. 6 and that the criminal cases against Donald Trump are a form of political persecution.

“And he believes, too, that if he can help get just a slightly higher share of Black voters, brown voters, young voters and ‘low-propensity’ conservative voters to vote for Trump — if he can make Trump and other Republicans just ‘lose by less’ in a place where they typically lose by lots — he can be a reason Trump wins back the White House,” writes Michael Kruse in this week’s Friday Read.

Read the story.

“So now fake movie actor George Clooney, who never came close to making a great movie, is getting into the act. He’s turned on Crooked Joe like the rats they both are. What does Clooney know about anything?”

Can you guess who said this about George Clooney? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.**

A New Front in the Israel Conflict: Lawfare … Last month, the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, settled a lawsuit over allegations that it had improperly received hundreds of thousands of dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans during the pandemic. It sounded like a boring bookkeeping matter and flew under the radar. “But behind the scenes, the settlement is a pretty good case study of the ugly ways America’s ideological divides — in this case, over Israel and Palestine — play out in courtroom warfare,” writes Michael Schaffer in this week’s Capital City column. That’s because the case was first brought by David Abrams, an attorney with the Zionist Advocacy Center, which has a track record of targeting organizations it views as hostile to Israel — even if the cases have nothing to do with Israel at all.

Two weeks out from the first presidential debate, Washington is still obsessed with the state of Joe Biden’s gray matter. Everyone’s got an opinion about his mental fitness, but nobody agrees on what will happen next. Will he stay? Will he go? Here’s how to navigate the inevitable “What’s going on with Biden?” conversations this weekend. (From POLITICO Magazine’s Ian Ward)

• Remind anxious Democrats that the post-debate polling isn’t as bad as it could have been. Sure, polls show Biden trailing Trump in a handful of key swing states, but the races are still tight, and other polls show Biden just one point behind Trump nationally. That’s within the margin of error!
• Tell Biden-skeptical liberals that a late exit for Biden — even if it leads to an open convention — wouldn’t be the end of the world. If necessary, the Democrat Party has an extensive set of rules in place to help the party select a nominee at the convention, and even if it might get a little messy, it’s hardly uncharted territory politically. If nothing else, it would make for great mid-August television.
• Let your conservative friends gloat about claiming that Biden was unfit for office before the Hollywood liberals got hip to it. (We’re looking at you, George Clooney!) It’s not often that Republicans can claim to be ahead of the curve — let them have this one. 
• Get ready for lots of comments about Biden confusing names at his press conference Thursday — he introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” (ouch) before correcting himself, and referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump” (ouch again).

Republicans Are Loving the Democratic Meltdown … For nearly a decade, Republicans in Congress have had to dodge thorny questions about their party’s messy behavior. So this week, as they watched their Democratic colleagues swarmed by reporters with thorny questions about the president, Republican politicians are experiencing a new feeling. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina summed up the schadenfreude to writer Ben Jacobs: “It’s fucking awesome.”

What Happened to Marco Rubio? … He was the GOP’s preacher of optimism. Jeb Bush said he made grown men cry. A Reaganite internationalist, a defense hawk, a champion of democracy. Then Donald Trump got elected, and Marco Rubio’s trouncing in the 2016 primary saw him fall into the MAGA line. “Now Rubio — one of the finalists in the Trump veep apprentice sweepstakes who joined the Republican leader on Tuesday night here for the first rally since The Debate — is inviting a harder look at how he remade himself for a changed era,” writes editor-at-large Matthew Kaminski.

From the drafting table of editorial cartoonist Matt Wuerker.

**Who Dissed answer: That would be Donald Trump, attacking Clooney — who recently called for Biden to step aside in The New York Times — on Truth Social.

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