Presented by the American Petroleum Institute.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Friday, August 4th.

And I'm guessing about now, you're sick of reading stories and headlines about Donald Trump's

latest indictment. So this morning, we're going to pivot into a different direction.

We've got an interesting backstory in Playbook this morning about Trump

and his inner circle's effort to change state party rules to help him win the nomination,

or, as Ken Cuccinelli told me just yesterday, rig the nomination. In California over the weekend,

Republicans adopted a winner-take-all primary strategy where if Trump were to win more than half of the vote statewide, he's going to get to keep all 169 state delegates.

That's significant because under California's older system, other candidates who didn't come in first place in the primary could still win some of those

delegates. And it turns out that there was a really intense behind-the-scenes lobbying effort

between the Trump campaign and the DeSantis campaign to try to convince California to do one thing

or the other. Obviously, DeSantis would benefit with a system where he would retain some delegates,

even if Trump won the primary.

But alas, he was not able to secure that.

And we heard some interesting detail about how when this original proposal was floated a few

weeks ago in late June, the first proposal that would actually benefit DeSantis. Trump actually snapped into

action. His aid started calling people. There were Trump allies accusing the state party of trying

to steal the nomination from Trump. And it turns out that the president in his inner circle talked

to Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who's very influential with California Republicans.

And McCarthy leaned on the GOP chairwoman, Jessica Patterson, who ultimately scrapped her original

proposal that DeSantis' people liked and helped ensure that Republicans adopted the proposal

Trump wanted, which is this winner-take-all strategy.

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