Good morning, It was another incredible week: Matt Belloni assessed the trade war’s impact on Hollywood; Kim Masters gathered the latest Mike-and-Pam murmurs; Eriq Gardner explained how CBS blew a historic TV deal, while Dylan Byers revealed the blown deal’s culprit; Julia Alexander foreshadowed Netflix’s new theater of war, and John Ourand detailed the streaming behemoth’s refined sports strategy; Bill Cohan interrogated Newsmax’s I.P.O. flash crash; Marion Maneker parsed the $100 million Paris auction sales; Lauren Sherman got to the bottom of the Saks debt nightmare; Sarah Shapiro explored the LoveShackFancy phenomenon; and Rachel Strugatz offered a talmudic reading of Sephora’s beef with TikTok. Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell pondered Trump’s tax apostasy; John Heilemann ran the latest numbers on the trade war; Abby Livingston scrutinized Schumer’s vulnerability; and Peter Hamby got his hands on some proprietary polling that the White House doesn’t want you to see. Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

Lauren Sherman chats with Saks C.E.O. Marc Metrick and surveys Nike’s challenges. and… Rachel Strugatz charts the rise of Tiktok Shop. meanwhile… Sarah Shapiro questions the LoveShackFancy growth strategy.

Marion Maneker breaks down the Cezanne and Matisse sales at Sotheby’s.

Matt Belloni rolls out the Trump Tariff Pain Index. and… Kim Masters collects the latest murmurs from the Warners lot and reveals a future Paramount org chart twist. meanwhile… Eriq Gardner digs into the CBS-Sony feud over Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

Bill Cohan considers Newsmax’s roller-coaster of a market debut.

Julia Alexander games out the imminent battle between Netflix and YouTube.

Dylan Byers returns to the CBS News crying rooms. and… John Ourand investigates the sports media creator economy.

Leigh Ann Caldwell contemplates Trump’s tax-the-rich fantasy. and… Peter Hamby pores over some proprietary Trump polling data. meanwhile… Abby Livingston performs a Schumer status check.

Julia Alexander and Dylan unpack the F1 media rights play on The Grill Room. and… UTA’s Jerry Silbowitz walks John through his next-gen talent strategy on The Varsity. and… Lauren and The Ringer’s Amanda Dobbins disentangle the Sofia Coppola fashion imprimatur on Fashion People. and… Heilemann and politically astute money guy Steve Rattner chew over the tariff math on Impolitic. and… Matt and Michael Wolff present the latest Zaz kremlinology on The Town. and… Bill and Peter try to make sense of Trump’s beef with the Fed on The Powers That Be.

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On Tuesday morning, I found myself in the drab lobby of a towering Midtown hotel, killing a bit of time between an inconveniently scheduled meeting and lunch with a legit media titan whose office happened to be across the street. Manhattan semiotics are a source of endless fascination. Before me stretched a landscape of business travelers in their quarter zips and attendant Rimowa luggage; Easter week tourists in ill-fitting athleisure wear, staring off into space; local suits intently pregaming their business meetings; and the lanyard-clad conference crowd energized by a day away from the office. Hotel lobbies make for great people watching. As I scanned the crowd, I dialed into one of my weekly meetings with Leigh Ann Caldwell, one of my newest partners, who joined Puck earlier this year as our chief Washington correspondent. Leigh Ann has spent decades acquiring an august reputation as an unerringly fair, no-bullshit truth-teller—a journalist’s journalist, liked and feared by all. And in her first months at Puck, she’s broken a ton of news on the private conversation coursing through Capitol Hill—the fate of Chuck Schumer, the titanic ambitions of A.O.C., Trump’s tactics to rein in his party’s mavericks, Mike Johnson’s insecurities, etcetera. One of the highlights of my week is our Tuesday morning editorial meeting, where I get to hear about her latest reporting targets in real time. As I sunk into a generic modernist sofa, beholding the new rhythms of tariff-era Gotham, Leigh Ann laid out the plan for her next piece. Yes, the president has been recklessly discarding sacred norms—targeting universities and law firms, imposing tariffs on our most trusted trading partners, and deporting unconvicted civilians without due process, to name a few recent offenses. But Leigh Ann had heard that Trump was floating an even more radical idea for a Republican president: In a recent meeting with G.O.P. senators, he’d extemporized about hiking taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Ever since their meeting, Senate Republicans had been discussing the details of how raising taxes on the top 1 percent could work. The ideas included increasing the uppermost tax rate from 37 percent to 39.6 percent—the status quo during the Obama years—for those making more than $609,000 per year. They also discussed the creation of a new, slightly higher tax bracket for those earning more than $1 million. It was a wild swing for the party of Norquist and Bush… and Trump, who is otherwise feverishly trying to extend the tax cuts he enshrined during his first term. It might have seemed far-fetched, Leigh Ann noted during our chat, but it also reflected some of Trump’s own natural political aptitude. Taxing the rich, after all, would cut against the argument that the Republicans have become the party of oligarchy. And it would steal a popular issue from the maws of the Democrats. To wit: You might recall that A.O.C. once showed up to the Met Gala in an Aurora James dress with the words “Tax the Rich” on the backside. It was a nice conversation piece at the time. Leigh Ann’s story, Trump Gets Ready… to Tax the Rich?, offers a vivid, nuanced portrayal of the modern Republican identity crisis—the evolution of a pro-trade, small-government, tax-cutting faction amid these bizarre and uncertain times. Trump’s proposal, after all, would represent a “reality altering” paradigm shift, as Jared Bernstein, the former Biden economic advisor, told Leigh Ann. The strategist Jesse Ferguson put it even more adroitly: “It used to be that Democrats tried to sound like Republicans on taxes to win voters. Now, Republicans are trying to sound like Democrats.” Indeed, this is one of the great leitmotifs of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend, Jon

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