With help from Eli Okun, Garrett Ross and Bethany Irvine

Three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses, there’s plenty of smart speculation that Florida Gov. RON DeSANTIS’ presidential bid is toast.

First, there was the news that his super PAC, Never Back Down, was doing just that — backing down, at least on $2.5 million worth of TV ads. This, following months of infighting over strategy in DeSantis’ orbit.

Now, NYT’s Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Nicholas Nehamas have penned what amounts to DeSantis’ campaign obituary — and the tick-tock of why he fell despite all the early hype over his White House bid.

Some eye-popping excerpts:

— On spending priorities: “Federal records show that, by the time of the Iowa caucuses, the DeSantis campaign is on pace to spend significantly more on private jets — the governor’s preferred mode of travel — than on airing television ads.”

— On the knives out for him: “Remarkably, in a race [DONALD] TRUMP has dominated for eight months, it is Mr. DeSantis who has sustained the most negative advertising — nearly $35 million in super PAC attacks as of Saturday, more than Mr. Trump and every other G.O.P. contender combined.”

— On puzzling strategy decisions: “Never Back Down bragged about knocking on two million doors by September — but more than 700,000 were households outside the key early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.”

— On disagreements between the PAC and campaign: “Some of the money was saved by not running digital ads. Never Back Down has paid for only a single Facebook ad, in South Carolina, since late September and nothing on Google or YouTube since the end of October, maddening the campaign team.”

This quote pretty much sums it up: “If the great promise of the DeSantis candidacy was Trump without the baggage, STUART STEVENS, a top strategist on MITT ROMNEY’s 2012 presidential campaign, said that what Republicans got instead was ‘TED CRUZ without the personality.’”

Ouch.

Even inside DeSantis world, the writing appears to be on the wall. Per the NYT, “RYAN TYSON, Mr. DeSantis’s longtime pollster and one of his closest advisers, has privately said to multiple people that they are now at the point in the campaign where they need to ‘make the patient comfortable,’ a phrase evoking hospice care.” (Tyson denied this account.)

The reporters write that others in the inner circle are talking about post-campaign “reputation management” given that DeSantis’ fan base has been “drained and demoralized.”

The DeSantis campaign dismissed the story and tried to blame the media for the negative narrative. “Different day, same media hit job based on unnamed sources with agendas,” ANDREW ROMEO said in a statement.

Privately, however, campaign officials are pointing the finger in another direction: at the newly ousted Never Back Down officials. Without naming names, one campaign official accused recently fired PAC officials of bitterly sounding off to the NYT.

Drama aside, the big question on everyone’s mind, of course, is when exactly DeSantis will drop out. Few expect it to be before Iowa, where DeSantis has staked his entire presidential campaign, visiting all 99 counties in a bid to out-hustle Trump. But if he doesn’t have a good showing in the Hawkeye State, top GOP strategists don’t expect his campaign to last much longer.

Good Sunday morning, and merry Christmas Eve! Thanks for reading Playbook. Drop us a line: Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels, Ryan Lizza.

SUNDAY BEST …

— Sen. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.) on threats to the nation, on ABC’s “This Week”: “I’ve never been more concerned about a terrorist attack on our homeland. … After October the 7th, jihadist groups all over the world are calling on their members to attack America as payback for us helping Israel. So, the threat levels are at all-time high. October the 7th put gasoline on a fire. And we need to get our border secure and up our game.”

— Deputy AG LISA MONACO on threats since Oct. 7 in the U.S., on “This Week”: “The FBI has received more than 1,800 reports of threats or other types of tips or leads that are somehow related to or have a nexus to the current conflict in Israel and Gaza. … The FBI has opened more than 100 investigations coming out of those reports.” More from Kelly Garrity

— Sen. BILL HAGERTY (R-Tenn.) on the Biden administration’s Middle East approach, on “Fox News Sunday”: “We’ve been sending mixed messages to Israel. We talk about cease-fires. We talk about sending humanitarian aid into Gaza. We talk about putting conditions on aid. These mixed messages, and the fact that we’ve allowed Iran to enrich itself and repopulate Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis with the weapons that they need, have created this situation. We need to come back and snap back economic sanctions immediately on Iran. We need to send a clear diplomatic message.”

— AL GORE on climate change, on CNN’s “State of the Union”: “The good news is we can reclaim control of our destiny … If we don’t take action, there could be as many as one billion climate refugees crossing international borders in the next several decades … Well, a few million has contributed to this wave of populist authoritarianism and dictatorships and so forth. What would one billion do? We can’t do this. We could lose our capacity for self-governance.” More from David Cohen

TOP-EDS: A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.

— “The Little-Known Rule Change That Made the Supreme Court So Powerful,” by Ben Johnson in The Atlantic

— “Beware Economists Who Won’t Admit They Were Wrong,” by NYT’s Paul Krugman

— “The Pandemic Killed Biden’s Presidency,” by WSJ’s Daniel Henninger

— “America Is Averting Its Eyes From Something Very, Very Wrong,” by NYT’s Pamela Paul

— “The English-Muffin Problem,” by The Atlantic’s Gilad Edelman

— “Cover the Republican Primary!” by Semafor’s Ben Smith

— “The Colorado Ruling Changed My Mind,” by George Conway in The Atlantic

— “It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love,” by NYT’s Thomas Friedman

At the White House

President JOE BIDEN has nothing on his public schedule.

VP KAMALA HARRIS has nothing on her public schedule.

9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR

1. A HOUSE DIVIDED: “House GOP traps itself in impeachment box,” by Jordain Carney: “Now that House Republicans have formalized the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, anything less than voting to remove him could look like failure. Right now, though, they don’t have the votes to do that — putting them in a bind of their own making.”

The political calculation: “‘We live in a binary political world,’ said Rep. KELLY ARMSTRONG (R-N.D.), noting that ‘Trump’s highest approval rating’ came right after House Democrats first recommended booting him.”

2. ALL IN THE FAMILY: Justice CLARENCE THOMAS’ influential network of former clerks (and some “adopted clerks”) has helped define the conservative legal world in his style and provide ballast to support him through controversies, as NYT’s Abbie VanSickle and Steve Eder trace. The famous ranks include LAURA INGRAHAM, JOHN EASTMAN, NEOMI RAO, CARRIE SEVERINO, JOHN YOO, JAMES HO and “adopted clerks” LEONARD LEO and Sen. MIKE LEE (R-Utah).

“What makes Justice Thomas’s clerks so remarkable, in large part, is their success as loyal standard-bearers of his singular ideology,” the Times writes, due especially to the unusually tight alumni network, maintained especially by his wife, VIRGINIA THOMAS. There are monthly lunches in Washington, screenings of “The Fountainhead,” trips to Gettysburg and various online forums.

3. RIGHT TURN ON THE LEFT COAST?: Both parties think former Rep. DAVE REICHERT has an actual shot at flipping the Washington state governor’s mansion to Republicans for the first time in nearly three decades, Zach Montellaro reports from Bellevue. Though the state is solidly blue, Reichert is a moderate who will seek to press a message centered on crime, homelessness and the economy. Early polling shows it could be close against AG BOB FERGUSON, the Democratic frontrunner. Trump and abortion are the familiar blue-state obstacles for Reichert, of course. But he has a long history and strong name ID in the state, thanks to his time in Congress and as King County sheriff.

4. HOW CLOSE WE CAME: “Biden Convinced Netanyahu to Halt a Pre-Emptive Strike Against Hezbollah,” by WSJ’s Vivian Salama, Dion Nissenbaum and Benoit Faucon: “President Biden urged Israeli Prime Minister BENJAMIN NETANYAHU to halt a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon days after Hamas militants’ Oct. 7 assault on southern Israel, warning that such an attack could spark a wider regional war. … Israeli warplanes were in the air awaiting orders when Biden spoke to Netanyahu on Oct. 11 and told the Israeli prime minister to stand down and think through the consequences of such an action, according to people familiar with the call.

“The Israeli attack didn’t go ahead. And the conversation between Biden and other U.S. officials and Netanyahu and his war cabinet — the details of which haven’t been previously reported — set a pattern of White House efforts to guard against any expansion of the conflict that could draw in the U.S.”

5. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: Biden had a lengthy conversation yesterday with Netanyahu, in which he did not ask Israel for a cease-fire, per the AP, though he pushed Netanyahu to protect Palestinian civilians. Meanwhile, in some of the war’s deadliest attacks yet, Israeli airstrikes yesterday reportedly killed nearly 100 people in two homes and more than 160 people total in the past day. And the Israeli military campaign in northern Gaza intensified as its forces got close to taking full control of the area, per Reuters.

Related read: “Iran Dismisses US Intelligence Tying It to Red Sea Attacks,” Bloomberg

6. WHERE HALEY WILL AND WON’T GO: As she tries to turn her polling surge into a genuine shot at beating Trump, NIKKI HALEY has to start flipping more non-college-educated, poorer and rural voters to expand her coalition, Republican strategists tell Reuters’ Gram Slattery. Relying on affluent suburbanites turned off by Trump won’t suffice. To that end, she’s been focusing a lot of campaign-trail energy and ad bookings on rural areas of early-voting states. But Haley doesn’t have much time.

On the flip side, Haley is not looking to expand her coalition in the other direction by convincing Iowa Democrats and independents to vote in the GOP caucus, NBC’s Vaughn Hillyard and Jillian Frankel report from Mount Vernon. Americans for Prosperity Action says their ground game is prioritizing Republican voters.

7. SINEMATOGRAPHY: “Border Deal Is Kyrsten Sinema’s Toughest Test,” by WSJ’s Siobhan Hughes and Eliza Collins: “Sen. KYRSTEN SINEMA [(I-Ariz.)] is working to pull together her biggest and most difficult bipartisan deal yet. It also could be her last.”

On the border deal talks: “She says she has put an emphasis on efficiency in [closed-door negotiations with Sens. JAMES LANKFORD (R-Okla.) and CHRIS MURPHY (D-Conn.)], while also giving regular progress updates to reporters, a break with her long-held reluctance to engage with the media.”

On her 2024 ambitions: “Sinema declined to say whether she plans to run again. Asked by a reporter if a successful immigration deal would affect her decision on whether to seek re-election, she responded: ‘Dumb question.’”

8. TRUMP LEGAL LATEST: Last night, lawyers for Trump asked an appeals court “to toss a federal indictment accusing him of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that he was immune to the charges because they arose from actions he had taken while he was in the White House,” reports NYT’s Alan Feuer. “Trump’s argument appears to be as much about prevailing in the appeals court as it is about a bid to slow down the case against him,” Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein write.

Biden, on the other hand, told reporters yesterday that he “can’t think of one” reason why a president should be protected from all criminal prosecution, per Bloomberg.

9. SPECIAL REPORT: “‘They were traumatized’: How a private equity-associated lender helped precipitate a nursing-home implosion,” by Anita Raghavan: “Advocates for elderly people say loans from private lenders are enabling nursing-home operators to take cash out of their homes, jeopardizing their finances.”

Joe Biden is planning more targeted travel to win over Black and Hispanic voters.

Van Johnson is concerned Biden’s Georgia strategy may be “too little, too late.”

Andrew Yang is giving a boost to Dean Phillips.

NEWS YOU CAN USE — “I Tried Jill Biden’s Post-It Holiday Hack. Here’s What Worked and What Didn’t,” by The Messenger’s Nicole Gaudiano

TRANSITIONS — Noah Panchure is now deputy director of advance for Nikki Haley’s campaign. He’s a Nick LaLota and Mehmet Oz alum. … Eli Nachmany is now an associate focusing on administrative law and complex civil litigation at Covington & Burling. He previously was a law clerk to Judge Steven J. Menashi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and is a Trump White House and Interior Department alum. … Sophia de la Torre is now government affairs senior manager at the RV Industry association. She previously was government affairs director at the Dulles Area Association of Realtors.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Stephanie Ruhle … Sabrina Singh … Anthony Fauci … Gene Sperling … Dan Pfeiffer … Conexión’s Marsha (Catron) Espinosa … Walter Pincus … CNBC’s Ylan Mui … Emory Cox of Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) office … Atif Harden … Charlie Liebschutz of SRCPmedia … Actum’s Anna Sugg … Samir Kapadia of the Vogel Group … NYT’s Brian Zittel … former AG Jeff Sessions … former Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) … Jordan Valdés ... Dorinda Moss Verhoff ... Corry Schiermeyer ... Michael Brown … AJ Sugarman … Dave Straka of Rep. Mike Turner’s (R-Ohio) office (3-0) … Sharon Williams … Philippe Etienne

Send Playbookers tips to [email protected] or text us at 202-556-3307. Playbook couldn’t happen without our editor Mike DeBonis, deputy editor Zack Stanton, producer Andrew Howard and Playbook Daily Briefing producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.

Correction: An earlier version of this newsletter misstated Marsha (Catron) Espinosa’s work affiliation.