Presented by the Vapor Technology Association.

Hello, I'm Adam Wren.

And I'm Dasha Burns.

It is Monday, July 28th.

And this is the Playbook podcast.

Without further ado, here are the three big stories driving the day. Let's start stateside as

Vice President J.D. Vance heads to his native and my native Ohio today to make a sales pitch

for the one big, beautiful bill act. It's the latest instance of Vice President Vance being perhaps

Mada's most loyal messenger. And Dasha, in today's

playbook, I dive into what I'm hearing from people around the vice president, Republicans

close to the White House, as he has surpassed his six-month mark in office. And it's interesting

to step back and look at what his role has been over these last

few months. It seems to me that he's kind of emerging as this defender of the faith, this keeper

of the Maga flame. He's someone who does a lot of trolling online, kind of as an outsider. But as an

insider, he has a lot of ties to Maga influencers like

Charlie Kirk, Laura Lumer, many others who he's keeping close ties with Tim Dillon.

Yeah, I mean, how much do you feel like the behind the scenes versus in front of the curtain

dynamics are aligned versus maybe a little bit different what we see versus what the West Wing gets.

Yeah, I'm fascinated by that. I mean, certainly his trolling in front of the curtain is pretty apparent.

But actually, it seems like it's the opposite behind the curtain that he's a real good sort of massager of internal fault lines, that he knows how to sue things over with a coalition.

And he kind of sees problems before they develop, as we've seen with Iran.

I still think he's been far more quiet on the Epstein Files issue.

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