Allies are complaining about a lack of a coherent message about why Republican voters should choose Mr. DeSantis over former President Donald J. Trump. Early strategic fissures have emerged between his own political team and the enormous super PAC that will spend tens of millions of dollars to help him. His Tallahassee-based campaign has begun shedding some of the more than 90 workers it had hired — roughly double the Trump campaign payroll — to cut swelling costs that have included $279,000 at the Four Seasons in Miami.

Now, his advisers are promising to reorient the DeSantis candidacy as an “insurgent” run and remake it into a “leaner-meaner” operation, days after the first public glimpse into his political finances showed unsustainable levels of spending — including a taste for private planes — and a fund-raising operation that was alarmingly dependent on its biggest contributors and that did not meet its expectations.

One recent move that drew intense blowback, including from Republicans, was the campaign’s sharing of a bizarre video on Twitter that attacked Mr. Trump as too friendly to L.G.B.T.Q. people and showed Mr. DeSantis with lasers coming out of his eyes. The video drew a range of denunciations, with some calling it homophobic and others homoerotic before it was deleted.

But it turns out to be more of a self-inflicted wound than was previously known: A DeSantis campaign aide had originally produced the video internally, passing it off to an outside supporter to post it first and making it appear as if it was generated independently, according to a person with knowledge of the incident.

The Jim Caviezel child-trafficking drama “Sound of Freedom” from faith-based distributor Angel Studios made $14.2 million in a single day when it opened July 4. You can chalk that success up to any number of reasons: Religious audiences are underserved, the film has been bolstered by major right-wing pundits (and Donald Trump himself), and it opened on a rare Tuesday after “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” had five days to quiet down.

But the film’s real godsend is the ability for “Sound of Freedom” fans to buy movie tickets for complete strangers.

Angel Studios calls it “Pay It Forward,” in which you can buy a ticket for “Sound of Freedom,” pay for another one, and someone else can apply to redeem it if they don’t have the financial means. A larger group of people buying tickets in bulk, such as for a company or a church, can even redeem a portion of their tickets for free. The distributor says of its $14.2 million haul, $2.6 million came from people overpaying through those Pay It Forward ticket sales.

That’s not just a few “angel” investors, either. Angel Studios’ website boasts that over 200,000 individual contributors chipped in for additional tickets, with a goal of 2 million tickets sold in the first week. (That would represent the 2 million kids who are trafficked each year; Angel claims to have already hit 1.4 million tickets.) Jared Geesey, Angel Studios’ senior VP of global distribution, tells IndieWire the team had to scale up Angels’ servers in response to a wave of people who wanted to support the film after seeing it on the 4th.

Elite colleges have long been filled with the children of the richest families: At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent. A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes.

“What I conclude from this study is the Ivy League doesn’t have low-income students because it doesn’t want low-income students,” said Susan Dynarski, an economist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has reviewed the data and was not involved in the study.

The U.S. government wins an overwhelming percentage of its cases. An analysis by Pew Research of available 2022 data shows a remarkable track record of success for federal prosecutors and a miserable outcome for defendants. In fiscal year 2022, only 0.4% of federal defendants chose to go to trial and were acquitted. In that year, 71,954 people were criminally charged by the feds, and only 290 of those went to trial and won. Another 1,379 defendants decided to give a trial a shot and were convicted. That means almost everyone else essentially gave up. They pleaded guilty.

That’s not to imply that Trump is going to throw up his hands and plead guilty. In fact, he seems to relish and benefit from taking on the government. The presumption of innocence is his, and it’s his right to vigorously defend himself. Yet, Trump and the rest of us need to understand that federal prosecutors play to win. They would rather dismiss a case, or not bring charges at all, than lose. Their track record is testament to a winning combination of the withering weight of evidence the FBI and other investigators can generate using their entire panoply of tools and techniques: from physical and electronic surveillance, informant development, undercover agents, cooperating witnesses and reams of paper and digital evidence that routinely proves cases beyond a reasonable doubt. Then, a talented cadre of America’s best prosecutors bring that evidence to court and present it as if America’s security depends on it — because it so often does.

Smith, unlike an elected local prosecutor who may feel pressure from voters, would not bring charges against a former president hoping that maybe something might stick. That’s not how this works. If he’s issued Trump a target letter, then we can surmise that Smith has his case, he’s got his evidence, and, unless Trump can convince him otherwise, Smith will indict Trump.

As much as the public may want to discuss the unprecedented nature of this case, the politics, alleged political bias, egos and political pressure, those are not the relevant details. Despite how Trump may view himself, he isn’t much different than those 72,000 defendants charged by DOJ last year. He’s another defendant, likely to soon be indicted by defenders of justice who, as a general rule, only bring the cases they are absolutely confident they can win.

Three of Donald Trump’s rivals for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination are pushing for cuts to Social Security benefits that would only affect younger Americans, as the party’s leaders grapple with the explosive politics of the retirement program.

In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped — but not for people who are near or in retirement.

Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare — a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party’s views — and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program.

“When people say that we’re going to somehow cut seniors, that is totally not true,” DeSantis said on Fox News. “Talking about making changes for people in their 30s and their 40s so the program’s viable — that’s a much different thing, and something I think there’s going to need to be discussion on.”

The Biden administration expects American-made F-16 fighter jets will arrive in Ukraine near the end of this year, a top spokesperson said, signaling that U.S. officials are feeling a new sense of urgency to deliver the warplanes as quickly as possible.

“Now look, the F-16s will get there probably towards the end of the year,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said on Fox News on Thursday. “But it’s not our assessment that the F-16s alone would be enough to turn the tide here.”

National security adviser Jake Sullivan echoed Kirby’s comments on Friday, saying the U.S. is “moving rapidly” to get F-16s to Ukraine.

We are going to push as fast as possible,” Sullivan said during remarks at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colo.