Hello, it is Thursday, October 12th.

I'm Scott Bland, your host, and you are listening to Politico's Nerdcast. We're going to start off this week by talking about some big personnel decisions looming in front of the Trump administration.

They nominated a new Department of Homeland Security Secretary this week,

but of course they've still got that empty slot to fill at Health and Human Services.

And as Nancy Cook will tell us, they are deep in the weeds of choosing a new chair of the Federal Reserve.

So we'll talk about those and more personnel decisions that the White House will be making

soon.

We're also going to be talking about the spat du jour that Donald Trump

has found himself in, this time with a member of his own party, Senator Bob

Corker. They got into it on Twitter, back and forth in the news media over the weekend. We'll talk a little bit

about what was said and why. And what, if anything, it says about Trump's relationship

with his own party as we've talked about recently as they are trying to notch a major win on tax

reform legislation sometime in the next few months.

And we're going to wrap up this week talking a little bit about campaign finance.

There is a pattern emerging across the Senate landscape for 2018 of Republican challengers

to Democratic senators lining up mega donor support before even jumping in to the races in the

manner that we saw from presidential candidates like Jeb Bush and Scott

Walker and others in the 2016 presidential campaign. So we'll talk a little bit about who's doing it, why it matters, what it means about some

of these crowded primaries that are emerging, and some of the other dynamics that are already

shaping the battle for the Senate in 2018.

A couple quick notes before we jump into that,

remember if you have questions for us,

...