Minority Leader McCarthy Quietly Meets With the President's Family Member and Top Unofficial Adviser to Talk 'Common Ground' While His Party Runs Attack Ads Against the President

NEW YORK — House Minority Leader McCarthy, who is in line to be Speaker if his party wins the midterms and whose party is currently spending tens of millions of dollars telling voters the President is a catastrophe, met privately in recent weeks with the President's family member and most influential outside adviser to discuss areas where the two sides might work together, according to people briefed on the meeting who were not supposed to be briefed on the meeting.

The session took place in a private space in Manhattan offered by a mutual friend, and covered immigration and the high cost of living, the two issues on which both parties insist the other is lying. Neither side announced it. Both sides, once it became public, described it as the kind of responsible outreach that grown-ups do, which is also how grown-ups describe things they had hoped would not become public.

The timing reflects a White House that has read the polls and is preparing for the possibility of a House run by the other party, and a minority leader who has read the same polls and is preparing for the possibility of running it. Activists in McCarthy's own party, who regard the President's inner circle as the enemy and had been promised a fight, reacted to the news of a cordial conversation with the phrase 'this guy needs to go.'

The opposing party's strategists, who spent the previous cycle accusing the other side's leaders of secretly coordinating with a hostile White House, reviewed the story for hypocrisy and found none, since their guy was the one in the room.

"Leader McCarthy will talk to anyone about lowering costs for working families," a spokesman said, confirming the meeting while declining to say who else he had talked to about it, or in which friend's apartment.

The Press's back channel desk notes that 'reaching across the aisle' and 'selling out the base' are the same meeting, and that which one it was depends entirely on whether your party's leader was holding the water glass. At press time the mutual friend remained mutual, and the private space had been returned to private use.