Good morning, everyone. I'm Playbook co-author, Ryan Lizza. It's Wednesday, October 25th. Here's what's driving the day.

Republicans have a new speaker designate. Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a favorite of the right who emerged from another round of secret balloting by House Republicans last night.

Johnson is the guy who was defeated on Monday by Representative Tom Emmer. And today we'll see if

Johnson fares any better than Emmer, who dropped out yesterday after being attacked by Donald Trump.

And that brings us to the other big thing driving the day, which is Trump

himself and the Trump's story here in Washington and in courtrooms around the country.

Joining me now to discuss the latest about how Trump has been influencing the House Speaker's

race and how the latest developments in the civil and criminal cases may be influencing Trump

is national political correspondent Meredith McGrath.

Good morning, Meredith.

Thanks for having me, Ryan.

So Trump is all over the place, as usual.

And we thought it would be a good day to break down sort of how Trump is affecting a number of things in national politics at the moment.

So let's start

with the endless House Speaker's race. I think we're on day 22 today. So we've passed the three

week mark. Trump had a bit of an influence on the fate of Tom Emmer yesterday. So let's start

with that. And maybe you can tell us a little bit of the

backstory of how Trump, how he has and hasn't been meddling in the speaker's race.

Yeah. On Tuesday, Donald Trump threw a torpedo in Emmer's hopes and dreams of being the next

Speaker of the House when he put out this truth social post right after Emmer had secured

the nomination internally from the GOP to be Speaker and he called him out of touch with Republican

voters, a globalist rhino, a bunch of other things in this post. And it stemmed from a few things we learned. One was that Trump had been

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