By Elana Schor

House Speaker Kevin Mccarthy speaks with reporters at the Capitol on July 25. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN-MANIA — Professional wrestlers come in two basic varieties: faces, the “good guys” of the ring, and heels, the “bad guys.” Occasionally a face will turn into a heel, or vice versa, based on the reactions from fans — who sometimes prefer a watchable heel to a predictable face.

Congressional leaders, when it comes to the personas they project at high-stakes moments, often follow the same exact template. And with 19 days left for lawmakers to stave off a government shutdown, Speaker Kevin McCarthy is forced to consider the role he wants to play.

McCarthy entered the last act of this spring’s debt-limit drama, Capitol Hill’s most recent big moment, looking every inch the face. He had leaned on conservative allies like Reps. Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene to help quell frustration on the right with a bipartisan agreement that inevitably gave ground from the House GOP’s original version.

But a week later, a group of hardliners derailed their own leaders’ bill on the floor. It was a show of force to squeeze the speaker, a reminder to McCarthy of his precarious hold on his party’s five-seat majority. (If it were a wrestling move, we might call it the Freedom Caucus Clutch.) House GOP leaders needed days to squash the resistors, who refused to rule out another takeover attempt.

It was a prime example of a moment that wrestling fans know well — when a bad-guy heel becomes more watchable and influential than a good-guy face. In ring parlance, that kind of advantage is known as “getting over” with fans.

McCarthy’s allies might argue that he’s getting over with the majority of the GOP, if not the party base, by trying to bridge the gap between the bumptious right and the quieter establishment. With conservatives increasingly ascendant in his majority, though, the speaker is facing a near-impossible dilemma as he tries to please all types of Republicans with a government funding plan.

So how does McCarthy get out of this bind? Instead of trying to play the conciliatory face again, he might consider a heel turn of his own.

For the oft-beleaguered and underestimated speaker, that would mean doubling down on his own agenda, damn the doubters and the haters. But first he has to decide which fan base he wants to get over with.

Does McCarthy care more about getting over with the GOP base or swing voters? If he chooses the first path, it’s time to push through whatever can pass the House before the Democratic-controlled Senate has a chance to approve its own stopgap government funding plan — and refuse to back down, even if it means a shutdown.

If the speaker wants to get over with swing voters, he’d do well to look back at which party took the blame for past government shutdowns before he decides how much brinkmanship to engage in. The verdict there is rather mixed,according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center; polling from both of the two most recent shutdowns, in 2013 and 2018, shows that Republicans may well have more to lose as the party out of power in the White House.

McCarthy’s only way to decisively absolve the GOP of blame for a shutdown, though, looks like striking a deal with Democrats. That means playing the heel for his party’s base and conservatives in his own conference — putting his gavel at risk by emboldening his critics to try to strip it from him.

It’s the kind of I-dare-you move that’s turned wrestling heels into icons. And the next 19 days will tell us whether McCarthy will drop the face act.

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at [email protected]. Or contact tonight’s author at [email protected] or on Twitter at @eschor.

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Asia adopts new technologies an estimated 8-12 years ahead of the West. Early adoption of mobile technologies has enabled Asia to explore and develop new forms of digital commerce before other regions. In doing so, Asia provides a glimpse of what the future could look like in more developed, Western economies. Learn more in the recent Citi GPS Report, Asia as a Time Machine to the Future.

— Prosecutors drop foreign-agent case against Trump transition adviser: The Justice Department has quietly abandoned one of the last prosecutions stemming from investigations into alleged foreign influence over Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In a court filing today, prosecutors indicated they’re giving up their long-running quest to convict Bijan Rafiekian, a California businessman and former business partner of Trump ally Michael Flynn, on charges of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey amid Trump’s successful White House bid seven years ago.

— Trump lawyers seek recusal of Washington D.C. judge in federal election subversion case: Lawyers for Donald Trump today requested that the federal judge presiding over his election subversion case in Washington recuse herself, saying her past public statements about the former president and his connection to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol call into question whether she can be fair. The recusal motion from Trump’s lawyers takes aim at U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama and has been one of the toughest punishers of Jan. 6 defendants. The request is a long shot given the high threshold for recusal and because the decision on whether to recuse belongs to Chutkan, who is unlikely to see cause to step aside from the case.

— Biden launches effort to take down Google in court: The Biden administration’s push to check the power of the tech giants gets its first big test Tuesday in a Washington courtroom where the Department of Justice will kick off a case designed to curb Google’s dominance in online search. The trial against the $1.7 trillion company will be “the most significant U.S. monopoly case in a generation,” said Bill Baer, a fellow with the Brookings Institution and former DOJ antitrust head under President Barack Obama. The DOJ’s suit against Google claims the company has become the overwhelmingly most-used search engine not because of a superior product but because it illegally uses its money to box out its competitors.

— Sen. Feinstein family legal drama sent to private mediation: The bitter legal drama around Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s family finances might be resolved out of the limelight after weeks of embarrassing revelations. A judge today ordered the parties in a dispute over the estate of the senator’s late husband to resolve their differences through mediation — generally a private process that will keep further details about the family finances out of public view. Superior Court Judge Roger Picquet, presiding over the first public hearing in the case, urged a settlement to litigation that has made national headlines and raised fresh questions about Feinstein’s ability to serve in the Senate.

GO INSIDE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST DIPLOMATIC PLATFORM WITH UNGA PLAYBOOK: The 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly will jam some of the world's most influential leaders into four city blocks in Manhattan. POLITICO's special edition UNGA Playbook will take you inside this important gathering starting Sept. 17 — revealing newsy nuggets throughout the week and insights into the most pressing issues facing global decision-makers today. Sign up for UNGA Playbook.

CLONE WARS — The AI “clones” of politicians are coming. And they’re not half bad. In June, the AI avatars of Joe Biden and Donald Trump engaged in a marathon session of profane trash-talking broadcast on Twitch, offering a surreal glimpse at one potential future of political debate, reports POLITICO.

Now a project called Chat2024 has soft-launched a much broader multi-candidate platform — a slick, Silicon Valley venture-backed version of what has so far just been a set of lighthearted experiments. On Wednesday, the project will officially unveil the AI-powered avatars of 17 leading presidential candidates. Each one is a chatbot trained on reams of data generated from at least a hundred sources, like candidates’ video appearances and writings. Users can query the bots individually, ask the same question of all 17 at once, or set any two of them against each other in one-on-one debates directed by user input.

14TH AMENDMENT UPDATE — State election officers have a near-unified message about the possibility of challenges to Donald Trump’s eligibility for the ballot in 2024: We want nothing to do with this.

“I don’t think it’s the role of the secretary of state to make a judicial determination,” Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, a Republican, told NBC News. “My job is to create the process and the environment in the state of Missouri where candidates can run and the voters of the state of Missouri have the accessibility, the elections have security and credibility, so that the people of the state can make a decision.”

At issue is a rarely used provision of the U.S. Constitution — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — which bars any person who took an “oath” to uphold the Constitution from holding public office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the nation. Some critics of the former president have said that Trump should be disqualified from appearing on the presidential ballot because of this provision. Secretaries of state in New Hampshire, Arizona, Michigan and Colorado have faced, or are preparing to face, legal challenges to Trump’s eligibility as they prepare state ballots for the upcoming Republican presidential primaries. NBC News reached out to chief election officers in all 50 states and D.C. Most are choosing not to weigh in on whether the insurrection clause in the 14th Amendment applies here.

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People recover a washing machine from their home that was damaged by the earthquake in the town of Amizmiz, near Marrakech, Morocco on Sunday. | Mosa'ab Elshamy/AP Photo

EARTHQUAKE SHAKEOUT — People in Morocco slept in the streets of Marrakech for a third straight night as soldiers and international aid teams in trucks and helicopters began to fan into remote mountain towns hit hardest by a historic earthquake, write Sam Metz and Mosa’ab Elshamy for The Associated Press.

The disaster killed more than 2,600 people as of this afternoon — a number that is expected to rise — and the United Nations estimated that 300,000 people were affected by Friday night’s magnitude 6.8 quake.

Amid offers from several countries, including the United States and France, Moroccan officials said Sunday that they are accepting international aid from just four countries: Spain, Qatar, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

While some foreign search-and-rescue teams arrived on Sunday as an aftershock rattled Moroccans already in mourning and shock, other aid teams poised to deploy grew frustrated waiting for the government to officially request assistance.

“We know there is a great urgency to save people and dig under the remains of buildings,” said Arnaud Fraisse, founder of Rescuers Without Borders, who had a team stuck in Paris waiting for the green light. “There are people dying under the rubble, and we cannot do anything to save them.”

Help was slow to arrive in Amizmiz, where a whole chunk of the town of orange and red sandstone brick homes carved into a mountainside appeared to be missing. A mosque’s minaret had collapsed. “It’s a catastrophe,’’ said villager Salah Ancheu, 28. “We don’t know what the future is. The aid remains insufficient.”

DEAL WITH THAT — Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) warned of a “devil’s deal” between Moscow and Pyongyang as North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un traveled to Russia today, a potential exchange that U.S. officials have warned would escalate tensions with the West, writes Matt Berg.

“He’s desperate for more equipment, he’s desperate for more support,” Coons said on MSNBC this morning, referring to Putin’s war efforts. “North Korea has a very large arsenal of artillery, of materiel. So, they may well make a devil’s deal.”

That could include the Kremlin agreeing to provide more advanced technology to help Pyongyang build a nuclear-armed submarine or successfully launch intercontinental ballistic missiles, both which Kim “is eager to do,” the senator said.

In return, Moscow could receive access to significant stockpiles of artillery shells, though they probably wouldn’t be the highest quality, Coons said. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters earlier this month that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had attempted to “convince Pyongyang to sell artillery ammunition” to Moscow during a recent trip to North Korea.

JOIN 9/19 FOR A TALK ON BUILDING THE NEW AMERICAN ECONOMY: The United States is undergoing a generational economic transformation, with a renewed bipartisan emphasis on manufacturing. Join POLITICO on Sept. 19th for high-level conversations that examine the progress and chart the next steps in preserving America’s economic preeminence, driving innovation and protecting jobs. REGISTER HERE.

HOTLINE, LIFELINE — As the opioid crisis reaches unparalleled highs in the United States, people affected are trying to stay alive in every way that they can. One method is projects like Never Use Alone, a safe use hotline that drug users can call before they use to make sure that someone is on the line while they’re taking drugs alone. For Kimber King, her decision to call the hotline saved her life: the woman on the other end of the line, Jessica Blanchard, called paramedics who managed to bust in and revive her after an overdose. Blanchard came to work at the hotline because of her own daughter’s continued struggles with opioid addiction. For Slate, Aymann Ismail and Mary Harris tell the story of Blanchard, King and how a phone call might not stop drug use but can save a life.

On this date in 2001: People flee from downtown Manhattan after planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. | Richard Drew/AP Photo

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Asia adopts new technologies an estimated 8-12 years ahead of the West, making it much like a time machine to the future. While its infrastructure has historically been underdeveloped relative to the West’s, Asia’s high internet connectivity, young and increasingly affluent and urban demographics, and entrepreneurial spirit have driven the region to adopt many technologies at a faster pace.

For example, early adoption of mobile tech has enabled Asia to explore and develop new forms of digital commerce before other regions. In 2021, digital/mobile wallets accounted for nearly 70% of the e-commerce transaction value in Asia, more than double that of North America or Europe.

Looking ahead, the trends and technologies seen across the region today can provide a glimpse of what the future could look like in Western markets in years to come.

Learn more in the recent Citi GPS Report, Asia as a Time Machine to the Future.

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