By Rachael Bade, Ryan Lizza and Eugene Daniels

With help from Eli Okun and Garrett Ross

DEVELOPING OVERNIGHT — “Israel and Egypt agree on safe passage for Americans from Gaza,” by NYT’s Edward Wong … “Saudi Arabia pauses normalisation talks with Israel amid ongoing war with Hamas,” France 24 … “Israeli military says it is examining incident in which Reuters journalist was killed,” Reuters

Will Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) stick with his recent transformation into a “team player”? Or will he revert back to the tough tactics he built his reputation on? | Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images

GOING IN FOR THE PIN — Back in September 2016, Rep. JIM JORDAN was on a crusade: He wanted the House to launch impeachment proceedings against IRS Commissioner JOHN KOSKINEN over allegations that the agency had targeted conservatives.

But Jordan had a problem: GOP party leaders saw impeachment as a political loser and refused to even haul Koskinen in for questioning.

Jordan wasn’t about to back down, however. He cornered then-House Judiciary Chair BOB GOODLATTE (R-Va.) on the House floor and presented him with a choice: Either you summon Koskinen to the Hill or the Freedom Caucus forces a vote on his impeachment a few weeks before Election Day.

Jordan got his hearing.

That is one of many instances where the Ohio Republican used hard-line tactics — or what some of his colleagues would call bullying — to get his way. He was so good at it, in fact, that we dubbed him the “other speaker of the House” at the time.

Jordan once again wants something that a whole lot of his colleagues don’t want to give him. As he makes a final push for the speakership, he faces his own choice: Does he stick with his recent transformation into a “team player”? Or does he revert back to the tough tactics he built his reputation on?

One thing is clear: He has work to do. While Jordan won the GOP nomination for speaker yesterday, the vote was far from the display of unity that he and his allies had predicted. An eye-popping 81 Republicans rejected Jordan in favor of a low-key backbencher, Rep. AUSTIN SCOTT (R-Ga.), who decided to run just hours before the vote.

“We were shocked at the number of people who did not vote for him,” Rep. DANIEL WEBSTER (R-Fla.) told Bloomberg’s Billy House. “There was nowhere else to go, and they still didn't want to go there.”

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The challenge Jordan is facing boils down to this: Despite becoming more aligned with leadership over the past three years, many of his colleagues still don’t trust him.

Lots of them worry he’ll embrace fiscal brinkmanship and steer the government into shutdowns. An even larger group is furious with how he treated STEVE SCALISE after the House majority leader won the nomination Wednesday, and they aren’t keen on seeing the second-place finisher end up with the gavel.

It should come as no surprise, though, that Jordan and his allies are ready to fight in a way that Scalise wasn’t. Their strategy is simple: Smoke out the holdouts in a public floor vote and put them in a political pressure cooker.

“What is going to happen is, they are going to vote on the floor, and then they hear from the grassroots,” Rep. TIM BURCHETT (R-Tenn.) told our colleague Olivia Beavers yesterday, echoing the belief in Jordan world that his opponents will cave under pressure from the GOP base.

The theory certainly has merit: On a secret-ballot revote yesterday where members were asked if they’d support Jordan on the floor, opposition dropped from 81 to 55. And of those 55, only a handful have made their opposition public — suggesting there is indeed a fear of openly opposing Jordan.

But getting to 217 will require a scorched-earth whipping effort that goes against the entire pitch Jordan made to his colleagues in recent days — that he’s a changed man who will represent all Republicans, not just base-pleasing conservatives. And should he move to bulldoze his opposition on the floor, that would repudiate his position earlier this week — that the nominee needed to garner 217 votes inside the conference before waging a floor fight.

(Note that Jordan isn’t alone in that particular flip-flop: Earlier this week, when Scalise was surging, ousted speaker KEVIN McCARTHY backed the get-217-first rule. After Jordan’s nomination yesterday, he and acting Speaker Pro Tempore PATRICK McHENRY told Republicans to fall in line, according to a person in the room: Jordan will be speaker. That’s a message neither man sent after Scalise was nominated.)

Despite the pressure, a group of Republicans are already privately coordinating an effort to hold firm against him. They include appropriators who don’t trust his judgment on government funding and defense hawks who don’t like that he has wavered on Pentagon funding increases.

They’re not, however, a group with a strong track record of defying their colleagues, to put it mildly. Jordan has other advantages, too: Unlike Scalise, who faced pressure to drop out after one day, he has more than three days to woo his opponents before Tuesday’s expected vote. And, frankly, many members are sick and tired of the drama, eager to pick a leader and move on.

A person familiar with Jordan’s whip effort rejected the notion that Jordan is trying to bully his way to the gavel. After securing the nomination yesterday, Jordan encouraged skeptical members to call him with their concerns, the person said, and not a single lawmaker has since told him that he won’t vote for him on the floor.

“Chairman Jordan has made it clear that he wants to unite the conference in order to pass the bills that the American people expect by giving Israel the resources they need to destroy Hamas, securing the border, and reforming FISA,” spokesperson RUSSELL DYE told us. “He is looking forward to working with the entire conference to do so when he’s speaker.”

Related reads: “House Can’t Respond to World Crises as GOP Speaker Fight Rages On,” by WSJ’s Molly Ball … “House speaker race injects chaos into high-dollar Republican fundraising,” by CNBC’s Brian Schwartz … “Past Is Prologue in the Republican Speaker Fight,” by NYT’s Carl Hulse … “Nancy Pelosi’s advice for the next GOP speaker,” by WaPo’s Karen Tumulty

Good Saturday morning. Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.

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At the White House

President JOE BIDEN and first lady JILL BIDEN will speak at the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner at the Washington Convention Center at 6:30 p.m.

VP KAMALA HARRIS has nothing on her public schedule.

Donald Trump is working quietly to change the RNC delegate rules in his favor. | Alon Skuy/Getty Images

9 THINGS THAT STUCK WITH US

1. WORKING THE REFS: NYT’s Shane Goldmacher, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman are up with a look behind the curtain at DONALD TRUMP’s efforts to quietly change the RNC delegate rules in their favor: “Mr. Trump and his political team have spent months working behind the scenes to build alliances and contingency plans with key party officials, seeking to twist the primary and delegate rules in their favor. It amounts to a fail-safe in case [Florida Gov. RON] DeSANTIS — or anyone else — scores a surprise victory in an early state. … The maneuvering is the type of old-school party politics that Mr. Trump, who cut his teeth in the machine politics of 1970s and 1980s New York, relishes and knows best: personal calls and chits, glad-handing, relationships and reprisals.”

The money quote: “‘They’ve rigged it anywhere they thought they could pull it off,’ said KEN CUCCINELLI, a former Trump administration official who founded Never Back Down, the pro-DeSantis super PAC that was essentially ousted from the Nevada caucus.”

2. REVISITING THE MOXLEY MURDER: “How R.F.K. Jr. tried to frame two innocent men for murder,” by Airmail’s Jeffrey Toobin: In a book about the murder his cousin was convicted of, ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. “took a complex and unfamiliar subject for most readers — here, a decades-old murder — and presented a tendentious and misleading version of the facts, tailored to his own preconceptions. Worse yet, Kennedy relied on an ugly racial stereotype — about ‘big, muscular, and tall’ nonwhite men — to attempt to pin the murder on two innocent people. Kennedy followed a similar approach in his later books about vaccines and the coronavirus pandemic: using cherry-picked details and bogus insinuations to make a case that his readers, as non-specialists, lacked the expertise to refute.”

3. THE WAR IN UKRAINE, AT RISK: “Has Support for Ukraine Peaked? Some Fear So,” by NYT’s Steven Erlanger: “The previous bipartisan support for Ukraine in the United States no longer seems to hold. … Should Washington cut its aid to Ukraine, deciding that it is not worth the cost, top European officials … openly acknowledge that Europe cannot fill the gap. …

“Ukrainians will quietly admit to difficulties with morale as the war grinds on, but they see no option other than to continue the fight, whatever happens in the West. … But some say that they are fearful that President Biden, facing what could be a difficult re-election campaign against Mr. Trump, will try to push Kyiv.”

4. THE WAR OVER ISRAEL, AT HOME: “U.S. institutions under fire for their support — or silence — on Israel,” by WaPo’s Laura Meckler, Tim Craig and Aaron Gregg: “U.S. companies, politicians, universities and school districts who took that approach found themselves under fire from Jewish groups and others for appearing to downplay what began this crisis a week ago: a militant attack by Hamas on Israel that killed hundreds of civilians.”

5. CHANGING THE SUBJECT: Arizona Senate candidate KARI LAKE’s pivot on a federal abortion ban is an example of a broader effort by the GOP to rethink an issue that has become a “political albatross” in battleground states, NYT’s Michael Bender reports: “Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, eliminating federal protections for abortion rights and handing Republicans one of their most significant policy victories in a generation, voters have turned out repeatedly to support abortion rights, even in red states.”

6. WHAT TRUMP WORLD IS READING: Ethical questions are looming over Biden’s reelection bid as he faces inquiries into his son HUNTER and an impeachment investigation, with a new AP/NORC poll showing that 35% of U.S. adults believing the president has “done something illegal.”

“Having fractured along partisan lines, the public largely appears to judge Joe Biden as much based on his party affiliation as the known facts. Roughly two-thirds of Republicans say they think Joe Biden is guilty of crimes pertaining to his son, but only 8% of Democrats and 38% of independents agree. About an additional third in each party say they think Joe Biden at least did something unethical.”

7. HEAVY METAL: Trump-era policies on metal tariffs are testing the Biden administration’s relationship with the European Union, WSJ’s Kim Mackrael and Laurence Norman report from Brussels: “Former President Donald Trump in 2018 slapped hefty tariffs on most U.S. steel and aluminum imports, citing national security as grounds. The move infuriated U.S. allies … and led some to impose retaliatory measures. … The Biden administration and the EU later announced a pause in the dispute and officials are looking to negotiate a new deal by January to tackle concerns about an oversupply of steel and its climate impacts.”

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8. CHUTKAN’S DILEMMA: A proposed gag order on Trump is putting the judge overseeing his election interference case in a tricky position, AP’s Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker report this morning: “It is the biggest test yet for [U.S. District Judge TANYA] CHUTKAN underscoring the unprecedented complexities of prosecuting the former Republican president as the judge vows not to let political considerations guide her decisions.

“Ending the stream of Trump’s harsh language would make the case easier to manage. But among the difficult questions Chutkan must navigate is how any gag order might be enforced and how one could be fashioned that does not risk provoking Trump’s base and fueling his claims of political persecution as he campaigns to retake the White House in 2024.”

Related read: “Judge punishes Rudy Giuliani for ‘continued and flagrant disregard’ of court orders,” by NBC’s Dareh Gregorian

9. WATCH THIS SPACE: “New Zealand Elects Its Most Conservative Government in Decades,” by NYT’s Natasha Frost: “New Zealand’s next prime minister will be CHRISTOPHER LUXON, a former chief executive of Air New Zealand, whose center-right National Party will lead a coalition with Act, a smaller libertarian party. … The new National-led government, despite being more conservative, was unlikely to make significant changes on many social issues. … But Act may seek to push policy priorities of its own, including a referendum to reconsider the role New Zealand’s Indigenous Maori people play in policymaking.”

CLICKER — “The nation’s cartoonists on the week in politics,” edited by Matt Wuerker — 15 funnies

Rick McKee - Caglecartoons.com

GREAT WEEKEND READS, curated by Ryan Lizza:

— “Understanding Hamas’s Genocidal Ideology,” by Bruce Hoffman for The Atlantic: “A close read of Hamas’s founding documents clearly shows its intentions.”

— “Who’s Afraid of a Spatchcocked Chicken?” by C Pam Zhang for Eater: “[S]queamishness around meat is embedded into the English language — and by extension, Western attitudes towards the realities of meat.”

— “The American Buffalo Documentary by Ken Burns Looks at the Slaughter — and Salvation — of Bison,” by Outside’s Steve Rinella: “In the new PBS documentary ‘The American Buffalo’ by Ken Burns, the filmmaker goes deep on the near-extermination of bison, unearthing stories that shaped — and still haunt — this country’s soul.”

— “Where the Orcas Swim,” by Martha Nussbaum for The New York Review of Books: “The death that humans inflict on whales today has little to do with demand for meat or blubber. We may think of whaling as a bygone practice, but it is ongoing, pervasive, and implicates us all.”

— “The Next Big Solar Storm Could Fry the Grid,” by WSJ’s Christopher Mims: “Scientists are using artificial intelligence to better predict what the sun will do and give Earth more warning to protect satellites and electronics.”

— “Scoop Dreams,” by NY Mag’s Reeves Wiedeman: “Shams Charania tweeted his way to the top of the NBA reporting world. He might be the future of sports journalism.”

— “The Grift, the Prince, and the Twist,” by Airmail’s Hannah Ghorashi and George Pendle: “It seemed like Liza-Johanna Holgersson had crafted an elaborate and fake persona to win the hearts (and hopefully the wallets) of a number of well-off men. But she wasn’t the only one pretending to be something they weren’t.”

— “The K-Pop Mogul Behind BTS Is Building the Next BTS,” by Bloomberg Businessweek’s Lucas Shaw and Sohee Kim: “With the world’s biggest boy band on hiatus, Bang Si-Hyuk wants to replicate the formula that changed music—but with even more global appeal.”

— “My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom,” by NYT Magazine’s Taffy Brodesser-Akner: “Taylor Swift’s greatest gift is for telling her own story — better than any journalist could. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner gives it a shot anyway.”

Brian Mast wore his IDF uniform to yesterday’s GOP Conference meeting.

Meghan McCain is launching a production company and podcast.

WHITE HOUSE ARRIVAL LOUNGE — Dilpreet Sidhu is now deputy chief of staff at the NSC and a special assistant to the president. She previously was deputy chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) … CBS’ Bob Costa … R Street’s Eli Lehrer … POLITICO’s Bianca Quilantan and Erin Aulov … Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute … Emily Atkin … Jack Fitzpatrick of Bloomberg Government … Ira Shapiro … Tucker Foote of Mastercard … Melissa Maxfield … CNN’s Annie Grayer … FGS Global’s Mike Feldman … Marshall Yates … Daniel Castro of the Center for Data Innovation … Chris May of Quadrant Advisory … “Cali” Chris Okey … Microsoft’s Dave Leichtman ... Brian Bond … Brunswick Group’s Anang Mittal … Chris Walker … DOJ’s Emma Dulaney … Isabel Milán … Grace Christin of Rep. Nikki Budzinski’s (D-Ill.) office … Anthony O’Boyle … AP’s Stephen Ohlemacher

THE SHOWS (Full Sunday show listings here):

CBS “Face the Nation”: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis … National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan … Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) … Liz Cheney … retired Gen. Frank McKenzie.

NBC “Meet the Press”: National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan … Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) … House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Panel: Hallie Jackson, Andrea Mitchell, Toluse Olorunnipa and Dennis Ross.

CNN “State of the Union”: National security adviser Jake Sullivan … Liz Cheney … Nikki Haley … Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog … Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

FOX “Fox News Sunday”: Israeli Lt. Col. Peter Lerner … Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) … Ben Sasse … John Kirby. Panel: Richard Fowler, Josh Holmes, Annmarie Hordern and Josh Kraushaar.

MSNBC War in Israel breaking news coverage, hosted by Katie Phang and Jonathan Capehart: Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) … Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) … Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) … Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.).

ABC “This Week”: National security adviser Jake Sullivan … Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus. Panel: Donna Brazile, Asma Khalid, Reihan Salam and Julie Pace.

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