Last week, shortly after The Wall Street Journal broke the news that President Trump’s Justice Department had informed him in May that his name was in the Epstein files—a follow-up to its previous mega-scoop about the president’s (alleged) lewd birthday card illustration—journalists inside the paper started sending around a provocative meme. It featured two cartoon dragons and essentially posited that the Journal was eating The New York Times’s lunch. “We’re on fire,” one journalist there conceded when I mentioned the meme. “The Times was always thought of as number one,” said another. “I’m not sure you can make that case anymore.”

The more telling response came from inside the Times, where editors and reporters readily acknowledged the Journal’s recent editorial triumphs and were quick to praise its plucky and charismatic editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, whom virtually everyone in the industry likes and admires—save, of course, for the largely somnolent bureaucrats that she evicted from the joint upon her arrival from Fleet Street a few years back. “They’re having a great run on Epstein, and, in general, I think Emma has succeeded in sharpening them,” one reporter said. Another veteran Times journalist was more effusive: “Emma is the best editor they have had in a long time, and she knows what a juicy story is and how to get it. And they’re the most competitive I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what the [dragon] drawing of us means, but they worry us.”

In the first Trump era, c. 2015-2021, an unprecedented surge of liberal panic fueled unparalleled growth across news outlets and seemed to herald a retro newspaper war between Dean Baquet’s Times and Marty Baron’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness”–era Washington Post—both of which tripled digital subscriptions over the course of Trump’s first term. As we all know, the Post’s run ended rather abruptly once Trump left office, Baron retired, and it became clear that publisher Fred Ryan had been resting on his laurels while Times C.E.O. Meredith Kopit Levien went out and built a multiplatform news-and-lifestyle subscription business that could withstand the vicissitudes of the news cycle.

From there, the Post descended into its current identity crisis under Will Lewis and Matt Murray—Tucker’s predecessor, by the way—and lost damn near all of its editorial talent. Meanwhile, the Times became the only available shorthand for what modern success actually looks like in the newsgathering business.

Into that vacuum stepped Emma, a veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s Times in the U.K., who embraced the role of change agent and quickly set about trying to make the paper edgier, faster, and less erudite—or less “safe and boring,” as one Times veteran put it—than it had been under Murray. She restructured units, including the Washington bureau, and laid off several newsroom veterans—often the academic types who professed their love for mentorship over actually filing stories or innovating the place, and the young fogies who had been raised in their image. For her efforts, she was rewarded with predictable protest from staff, who stuck Post-it notes on her office, and complained that these allegedly egregious cuts signaled a retreat from certain coverage areas, including politics and technology.

In fact, Emma was clearing deadwood and making space for new hires, including veterans of the Post, Politico, and elsewhere. Under new Washington coverage chief Damian Paletta, the Journal quickly started producing some of the most distinctive and agenda-setting coverage, starting with the murmurs about Biden’s efficacy and then the plotlines of Trump’s first months back in office—Elon Musk’s DOGE agenda and personal behavior, Trump’s geopolitical moves and pinballing tariff policies, and the current Epstein controversy. In an appearance on The Grill Room in March, Emma described her new strategy as “modernizing the newsroom—it’s about bringing in the skills that we need, some of the skills that were lacking when we got here. It’s about raising the metabolism of the newsroom and getting in people who are absolutely top of their game.”

In the meantime, the Times entered a new era of its own. As Meredith continued to grow the business along increasingly diversified revenue streams, executive editor Joe Kahn evidenced himself as more of a Bill Keller than a Baquet—remarkably thoughtful and undeniably brilliant, but the sort of cerebral foreign correspondent type who doesn’t quite have the natural instinct that differentiates the good editors from the truly exceptional ones. Meanwhile, after stockpiling a fusillade of talent during the Trump years and WaPo’s rolling crises, the Times’s deep bench doesn’t always manifest its promise.

Yes, the Times continues to drive news and produce scoops—Eric Lipton on Trump’s crypto business, Michael Schmidt on Trump’s war with the Ivy League, Jodi Kantor on the Supreme Court, etcetera—but many of the buzziest scoops that used to emerge from Trump 1.0 stars like Maggie and Swan seem to come less frequently. Scholars of the trade who remember David Fahrenthold’s Pulitzer-winning work at the Baron-era Post may have been bemused to read his recent piece entitled, “The Short-Lived Plan to Produce a Trump-Themed Instant Pot.” (Yes, this was a hook for a broader examination of lobbying tactics in the Trump era, but still…)

It’s fascinating to watch the Times, which famously thrives in crisis, adjust to its new position of economic comfort. But we’ve also reached the point in the cycle, three years into Kahn’s decidedly drama-filled reign, when the resident kremlinologists begin to wonder about the next person to ascend the greasy pole. Kahn, who is 60, has five years until he hits the mandatory retirement age, but industry folk wisdom suggests he could step back earlier to ensure the ascent of Carolyn Ryan, who is only slightly his junior. Ryan, in many ways, has a whiff of Tucker’s news judgment, but has also been a creature of 620 Eighth Avenue long enough to have truly mastered the inside game.

In the coming years, we should all expect micro-narratives to coalesce around Kahn and the potential successors, all rendered in the predictably Times-ian hushed-tone euphemisms—the sort of word salad that can oscillate between compliment and critique based on the octave of voice or setting. Barring unforeseen events, Kahn may be referred to as brilliant and a great leader or a steady hand or even the perfect person for the moment. Then you can expect a pause before, perhaps, something like, Now, we might need more of an Emma Tucker type.

In any event, the Journal’s starring role in this political cycle came to a head the other week when Trump, predictably miffed by the paper’s Epstein reporting, decided to sue the Journal; its publisher, Dow Jones; Dow Jones’s parentco, News Corp; and, most notably, its proprietor, News Corp chairman emeritus Rupert Murdoch, for defamation. This week, Trump’s lawyers called on a judge to depose Rupert and force him to testify under oath within the next two weeks on the grounds that, at 94, he “has suffered, but thankfully overcome, multiple health issues throughout his life.”

Until the lawsuit, I’m told, Trump and Rupert communicated frequently, and many inside the Journal suspect that Trump is especially vexed by the fact that he’s taking heat from Rupert’s paper rather than a more predictable antagonist. (In his Truth Social response to the Journal’s initial Epstein report, Trump memorably suggested that Murdoch had given him assurances that he’d “take care of” the story; my sources tell me no such assurances were ever given.) In any case, Trump’s lawsuit against the Journal has inspired a lot of media insiders to fantasize about Murdoch actually going head to head with the president in court. Rupert may try to call Trump’s bluff, or, pragmatist that he is, he may simply pay to make it go away. Either way, one suspects that the aging mogul interprets the suit, at least in part, as a sign that he made the right choice in Tucker.