Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your Saturday compendium of the best work emanating from Puck.

It was yet another characteristically fabulous week: Matt Belloni predicted Disney’s future entertainment strategy while Kim Masters hypothesized who will replace Bob Iger; Eriq Gardner outlined Netflix’s legal challenges in its pursuit of WBD and Julia Alexander assessed the streamers’ podcasting paradigm. Meanwhile, Dylan Byers toured the Bari Weiss crying rooms; John Ourand got to the bottom of a commissioner defenestration; Bill Cohan ran the latest numbers on the David Zaslav auction process; Lauren Sherman captured the anxiety around Saks Global; Rachel Strugatz evaluated a beauty M&A opportunity; Sarah Shapiro perused Nike’s financials; Marion Maneker got to the bottom of $5.4 billion in auction sales; and Ian Krietzberg examined Elon Musk’s latest legal headache.

Down in Washington, Abby Livingston observed the day-trading beef on Capitol Hill; Peter Hamby revealed Trump’s latest weakness in the manosphere; Julia Ioffe explained the real Donroe Doctrine; and Leigh Ann Caldwell surmised where the president’s revenge tour might lead.

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

Lauren Sherman offers all the latest intrigue about the Saks debt crisis and enumerates John Idol’s options at Capri.
and…
Rachel Strugatz surfaces an opportunity in the beauty acquisitions market.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro assesses Nike’s turnaround plan.

Marion Maneker parses all the tranches of the auction houses’ $5.4 billion haul in 2025.

Matt Belloni unfurls his annual predictions list: the future of Lucasfilm, the composition of the next Disney C-suite, and the fate of the Michael Jackson movie.
and…
Eriq Gardner examines all of Ted Sarandos’s potential legal challenges in the WBD deal.

Ian Krietzberg details Elon Musk and Grok’s deepfake scandal.

Helen Schulman christens the smash-and-grab decade.
and…
Andrew Zucker dishes on the sleeping secrets of the ultra-rich.

Dylan Byers documents the latest Bari Weiss drama and analyzes the suddenly frothy digital media market.

John Ourand shares his notes on the NASCAR scandal.
and…
Julia Alexander kicks the tires on Netflix’s foray into audio.

Bill Cohan dissects the voodoo economics of Zaz’s cable networks stub.

Leigh Ann Caldwell chronicles the carnage of the Trump revenge journey while Peter Hamby identifies the president’s vulnerability in the broverse.
and…
Julia Ioffe details a State Dept. Jerry Maguire moment.
and…
Abby Livingston gets into Capitol Hill’s stock trading discourse.

Dylan and Julia A. chew over the $330 million Semafor valuation on The Grill Room.
and…
Ourand welcomes Mark Marshall, NBCU’s ad czar, onto The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and Bill debate Saks’ options on Fashion People.
and…
John Heilemann and Michael McFaul consider the Donroe Doctrine’s place in history on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Scott Mendelson examine the year at the box office on The Town.
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Peter Hamby and Leigh Ann weigh in on the Minneapolis madness on The Powers That Be.

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On Monday afternoon, Puck C.E.O. Sarah Personette and I left our airy and modernist company headquarters in South Tribeca and hopped on the 1 train, en route to the heart of Midtown. Our destination was the Ed Sullivan Theater, for a taping of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the beloved program that will soon vanish from the Earth under the Ellisons’ ownership of Paramount. In particular, we were there to watch Colbert’s segment with our partner Julia Ioffe.

Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/Courtesy of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

Julia is rightly known as the culture’s foremost expert on Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin, and Russia’s war in Ukraine. But, in reality, she’s perhaps even more plugged into the inner workings of the State Department, intelligence community, and broader national security scene—what Ben Rhodes memorably termed “the Blob”—than just about any other journalist at work today. And so when Trump decided to launch military strikes inside Venezuela and apprehend its strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, Julia was squarely in the middle of the information flow.

Julia usually helms the Thursday issue of The Best & The Brightest, Puck’s excellent political product, but war games tend to shift schedules. So she spent her Acela ride up to Manhattan working the phones and composing a story that brilliantly captured the essence of the political moment. As pundit philosophers and copycat reporters were aping one another’s attempts to articulate the emerging so-called Donroe Doctrine, Julia instead offered a more powerful advancement of the scholarship on Trump’s budding imperialism. In Neocon Don, she artfully explained how the president’s largely consequence-free projection of military power, in Iran and elsewhere, laid the groundwork for his Venezuelan campaign. But she also played the logic forward and wondered where it might leave us.

What might happen, say, when Xi starts to play by the same rules? “If this hemisphere belongs to Trump, surely Russia and China can claim dominion over their own backyards now, too,” Julia wrote. “Not long after he first launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin and his elites dreamed of a Yalta 2.0, where the big boys leading the three big superpowers (as Russia imagined them) would carve up the world into spheres of influence in which Russia, China, and the U.S. could do what they wanted, without interference or scolding. The idea seemed laughable then. But after this weekend, it looks like Trump, armed with the Donroe Doctrine, might have given them exactly that.” Naturally, she touched on the topic desk-side with Colbert.

Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/Courtesy of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

Julia and I are not only partners, but also generational peers—our entrée into adulthood was framed by the twin calamities of 9/11 and the endless wars that rose from its ashes. And we’ve acknowledged to each other that we’re living through an era when both political parties have been influenced by GWOT veterans, from Vice President J.D. Vance to Rep. Jason Crow, who have questioned various aspects of their wartime experiences. Trump, of course, long ago detected this whiff of discontent with interventionism and adroitly folded it into his political brand—until, as so often happens, he reversed course. During his cold open, Colbert joked that the president must have ordered the strike while reviewing his redactions in the Epstein files.

The administration’s management of Maduro and Venezuela, and its decision about what comes next, may indeed turn out to influence a future generation of citizens. Regardless of your political persuasion, I’d urge you to curl up with Neocon Don this weekend—a story that will help you understand where this is all headed. These emerging spheres of influence have become one of the great stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read about at Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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