Good morning,

It was yet another fabulous week: Dylan Byers gathered the news from the CNN bunker as it begins its digital transformation; Matt Belloni surfaced an underappreciated Hollywood M&A target; Bill Cohan imagined a Zaz-Murdoch deal; Julia Alexander solved an NFL streaming riddle; Teddy Schleifer broke the news of Trump’s donor ultimatum; Tara Palmeri depicted the DeSantis fugue state; and Lauren Sherman reported on Georgina Chapman’s mini revival.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan imagines a Murdoch M&A idea.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers captures the echoes and anxieties of the post-linear CNN.
and…
Eriq Gardner unfurls the continuing legal saga of a former Fugee.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni dissects a studio executive shuffle and scoops a Succession megadeal.
and…
Julia Alexander runs the traps on the Peacock-NFL numbers.
and…
Scott Mendelson charts the box office dude slump.

SILICON VALLEY:
Baratunde Thurston explains what really lies beneath the OpenAI-Times lawsuit.

WASHINGTON:
Teddy Schleifer delivers the exclusive on Trump’s new phony loyalty oath.
and
Tina Nguyen and Abby Livingston report on Mike Johnson’s falling knife from the right and left, respectively.
and…
Julia Ioffe reexamines the Israel war crimes question.
and…
Peter Hamby and Tara Palmeri vivisect the Haley endgame and the DeSantis denouement.

PODCASTS:
Matt Belloni and Jim Miller discuss Lorne Michaels succession speculation on The Town.
and…
Tara Palmeri and New Hampshire prognosticator Drew Cline detail the DeSantis flop on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter Hamby and Teddy chew over Trump’s donor strategy on The Powers That Be.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

Anyhow, the drama du jour, of course, coalesced around the nascent speaker, Mike Johnson, an underwhelming fundraiser and legislator who is operating in an almost comically unmanageable situation—at the beck and call of the Freedom Caucus, the Twenty, and other sectarian groups whose raison d’être appears to be making the poor guy’s life hell. (And we wonder why our brightest minds pick other paths over public service these days.) Republicans in his conference were already beginning to toy with giving him the McCarthy treatment. Democratic rubberneckers were glued to the drama across the aisle. I remarked at Congresswoman DelBene’s sangfroid. It’s hard to be an adult in the room, especially when the consequences are so significant. Thank heaven that some of our best and brightest are focused on making government work.

As we were speaking, I spied Tina Nguyen entering the room. We had all gathered—congresswomen DelBene and Debbie Dingell, a clutch of campaign reporters, assorted operatives, Scott Mulhauser and other Puck friends like Michael Moroney, etcetera—to toast Tina upon the publication of her new book, The MAGA Diaries. As the title suggests, the book documents not only the ascent of modern right-wing populism—the very movement behind the latest threats to freeze the government, as DelBene and I discussed—but also Tina’s early proximity to its origins.

At Puck, we often note that our generationally talented journalists aren’t simply brilliant reporters and storytellers; they are also uniquely qualified domain experts. Matt Belloni was an entertainment lawyer before he became the oracle of Hollywood. Bill Cohan was an investment banker before he replaced Excel with Word. Julia Ioffe’s singular reportage on Putin is inspired by her Soviet roots. (Listen to her chart-topping podcast, About a Boy, for a true insight into how the past is so often political prologue.) Dylan Byers worked at CNN before he became its confession-taking high priest. And Tina grew up in the conservative movement, at Claremont McKenna and then the Daily Caller, before becoming a singular documentarian of the movement. I’ve known Tina for a decade. She was the only person who told me with conviction, back in 2016, that Trump was going to beat Hillary Clinton. She understood the mood of the base, the touchpoints, and the political pipeline. I recalled that stunning memory in a brief toast.

We don’t ask our journalists to be prognosticators, but Tina is the ne plus ultra narrator of these bizarro political times. The day after the party, she composed her latest Hill dispatch, Mike Johnson’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a veritable noir comedy about the speaker’s innumerable pickles. Can Johnson become a Houdini-style political contortionist—funding the government, settling scores in his party, and surviving its various civil wars all at once? It’s the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend, and buy Tina’s book here.
Jon