Welcome back to Dry Powder, I’m Bill Cohan.

There are only nine days until Election Day, and many bigwigs on Wall Street are preparing for, and resigning themselves to, the looming prospect of Trump 2.0. Indeed, many of the executives I spoke with believe that his reelection is all but inevitable—and were quick to enumerate the ways in which Kamala Harris’s campaign is seemingly stumbling toward the finish line. More on that, below the fold.

But first…

• A fall reading recommendation: My good friend Peter Rose, the former head of communications at both Goldman Sachs and Blackstone, joined the ranks of book authors in May. Rose, a graduate of Yale Law School, recently published the paperback edition of The Good War of Consul Reeves about John Reeves, who was named the British consul to the Portuguese colony of Macau, in southern China, just prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Peter became interested in the topic when he was living and working for Goldman in Asia. He describes the book as historical fiction, based in part on Reeves’ unpublished journals during the war and his own deep authorial research. The Asian Review of Books “strongly recommended” The Good War, and so do I.

Back in April, Ari Emanuel’s publicly traded Endeavor Group Holdings announced that Silver Lake Partners, its largest investor, had agreed to take the company private in a $13 billion transaction—one of the largest private equity deals of the year, even if the valuation was on par with Endeavor’s I.P.O. price a few years earlier. That deal, which is expected to close early next year, offered a second Endeavor liquidity event for Ari, who negotiated himself a bag of goodies, including the ability to earn 2.5 percent of the net cash proceeds from WME every quarter and a new plane. His co-founder, Patrick Whitesell, could receive a similar package if he stays at the company, or enjoy a $60 million golden parachute ride if he leaves. (He is also getting $250 million from Silver Lake to do his own thing.) Endeavor president Mark Shapiro would see his salary double to $7 million per year, plus a guaranteed $15 million bonus and a second $15 million bonus when the deal closes. He’ll also receive 1 percent of the new private Endeavor. My partner Matt Belloni broke down all the incentives via his sumptuous deep-reading of the 8-K, which I recommend as much now as I did then. (Disclosure: WME represents Puck but not me.)

As part of the go-private agreement, Ari also arranged for himself a $25 million bonus when various assets are sold out of Endeavor—an apparent recognition that the mishmash he created, and which the public markets frowned upon, needed to be somewhat unwound. In the new deal, Shapiro could potentially earn as much as another $100 million if, as Matt wrote, he “purges everything they want purged.”

Well, earlier this week, Ari and Mark did sell a bunch of assets—including Professional Bull Riders, the event experience company On Location, and a big chunk of what’s left of IMG—out of Endeavor. I don’t think I can recall another example of a material group of assets being sold during the pendency of a big go-private transaction, although obviously those asset-sale bonuses gave the two men plenty of incentive to do just that, or so it seemed.

But there was a twist. Endeavor is selling those assets to its own affiliated public company TKO, the parent company of WWE and UFC. In exchange, Endeavor will get an additional $3.25 billion of TKO stock, increasing its equity ownership to 59 percent. TKO also announced that it would start paying a $75 million dividend and that it would buy back as much as $2 billion of its stock. (The TKO stock is up 42 percent in the past year, and the company has a market value of nearly $20 billion.) Oh yes, it’s worth noting that Ari is also the C.E.O. and executive chairman of the board of TKO and Shapiro is the C.O.O.

To make the deal look all pretty, TKO set up a special committee of its board of directors and hired Moelis & Co. and Skadden Arps to put a bow on it. On the Endeavor side, the spinning began immediately. “Today’s announcements reflect the continued strength of our underlying business and our commitment to deploying capital through a balanced capital allocation strategy, including through our share repurchase program and quarterly cash dividend program,” Ari said. For his part, Shapiro said the new assets will “meaningfully enhance” TKO’s portfolio and “strengthen our position in premium sports globally.”

The combination is supposed to save TKO $30 million annually by the elimination, in part, of an annual services fee that the company has been paying to Endeavor. According to Ari, the deal will add $2.1 billion in adjusted revenue and $265 million in adjusted EBITDA to TKO, suggesting that the company is paying a full 12.3x adjusted EBITDA for this hodgepodge of Ari’s leftovers. Investors seemed to dislike the deal, sending the TKO stock down 11 percent on the week.

So what actually motivated this transaction? Did Silver Lake not want these assets as part of the rest of Endeavor it is still hoping to buy? Did the asset-sale bonuses to Ari and Mark motivate them to sell anything that wasn’t nailed down at Endeavor? I reached out to Endeavor to learn more. Instead, I got a call back from Matt Levine, at Brunswick, representing Endeavor. He told me that the assets TKO bought from Endeavor will be “additive” to TKO’s “sports ecosystem.” As for why the deal was happening now, he noted that Shapiro has said publicly that Vince McMahon, the former TKO executive who is battling charges of sexual abuse, did not want to do the deal with Endeavor. But since he resigned in January, the deal could sail through under the leadership of Ari and Mark.

There’s one more salient detail. Since the deal for these Endeavor assets was done with TKO, an Endeavor affiliate, both Ari and Mark agreed not to take their asset-sale bonuses of $25 million and $100 million, respectively. (Levine did not respond to my request for a more detailed explanation.)

The political guru Charlie Cook all but predicted Trump will win in a talk at the Economic Club of New York this past week. The market proxies also all seem to be moving in Trump’s favor. DJT, the publicly traded company that my friend Scott Galloway says is the best indicator of Trump’s political fortunes, is pointing increasingly toward his victory. After reaching a low of around $12 a share on September 23, two weeks after the Trump-Harris debate, the stock has been on a tear. It now trades at nearly $35 a share, fairly tripling in a month’s time. It was up another 11 percent on Friday, to $39 a share. Trump’s personal stake in the company of just under 60 percent is now worth $4.7 billion. One longtime Wall Street trader worried that deep-pocketed friends of Trump are driving up the DJT price to make a victory look apparent, even though the stock market and battleground state voting patterns are decidedly different animals. “Someone like Elon could be buying the stock,” he emailed me. “No big deal money wise for him, but the phony strength in DJT stock gives the impression that Trump will win.”

The Real Clear Politics “betting average” of a group of investor bets on the outcome of the presidential election has Trump at 60 percent to Harris’s 40. And, as my partner Tara Palmeri recently noted, this reflects the confidence currently emanating out of Mar-a-Lago. Polymarket, perhaps the leading election betting site, is giving Harris a 60 percent chance of winning the popular vote but favors Trump’s chances of winning the Electoral College at 64.2. A republic if you can keep it, indeed.

One former, very senior Wall Street executive who did a stint in Washington, and who might like to go back, is resigned to the inevitability of Trump 2.0. Part of his worry, he says, is how people experience the economy, and whether they feel better off than four years ago. Objectively speaking—with low unemployment, higher wages, a roaring stock market, and an economy that’s currently the envy of the world—they should feel better, but apparently they don’t. Inflation is a big part of the problem, even though the actual rate of inflation has come down in recent months. “Inflation is cumulative,” he said. “And it could be the cost of just everyday goods, everyday services. What’s it cost to get a plumber to my house? What’s it cost to borrow money? All those things have gone up, and whether the president’s responsible for them or not—and by the way, the president’s not as responsible or can’t control as much as people think—they own the outcome.”

But, the former executive went on, there are “two sides to every coin, and unfortunately, Harris is not a really good candidate, either.”

He noted that her polling with men “in any race, color, or creed” is “just horrible”—at least compared to how Democratic presidential candidates have performed historically—arguing that “it’s not a male-female thing, because I think the country is more than ready for a female president.” What is it, then? “I really think that giggly, smiley thing gets her in so much trouble,” he said, echoing a misogynistic refrain that, unfortunately, has become a common knock against Harris in some quarters. “It’s the nonverbal cues that are so important when you’re trying to win someone’s emotions.” Ultimately, he said, it’s a matter of “which extreme bothers you” more—the “giggly woman” or the “insane demagogue.”

He thinks both candidates often misfire in connecting on a human level. He cited as an example Harris’s non-answer to the question on The View of what she would have done differently in the Biden administration. “How about if she’d said, ‘Hey, everyone’s smarter with hindsight. Based on the numbers we’ve seen now, we clearly made a misjudgment at the southern border.’ All she had to do was be human for one minute, and say, ‘Okay, I’ve learned something. Everyone’s smarter today than they were four years ago.’ As much as Trump misses the human gene and the empathy gene, she sort of misses it, too. She’s just more eloquent about it.”

Like many on Wall Street, he said he’s “praying” that at least one of the houses of Congress goes to the Democrats in order to keep Trump in check—what Wall Street types approvingly call “gridlock” in Washington. He said he thinks the Republicans will take the Senate with 51 seats, but nevertheless believes Trump would have a hard time getting his most radical nominees and legislation through the upper chamber. As for the House, he said that a few weeks ago it was clear that the Democrats would take it back, but now he’s not so sure. He thinks it’ll come down to congressional races in New York and California.

According to another Wall Street bigwig who called me the other day, it was probably “crazy in hindsight” to pick Harris to be the nominee, without a process that might have resulted in a more middle of the road option, a popular governor like Josh Shapiro, in Pennsylvania, or Andy Beshear, in Kentucky. Harris, he argued, is running, “a pretty shitty closing campaign” by choosing to focus on the threat posed by Trump rather than making an affirmative case for herself: “She should be out there saying, Hey, what do you mean inflation? Inflation is down. We’ve had a soft landing. The economy is recovering. Interest rates are coming down. It’s morning in America. A pandemic? We pulled out of it. We’re poised for economic growth. The stock market’s always a leading indicator, and it’s bullish.” He thinks Harris should stop attacking Trump and instead present her positive vision for the future. “It happens to be the truth,” he said. “You’ve got to go on the offensive.”

He, too, is hoping for gridlock to help rein in Trump. He said he thinks the Republicans will win the Senate and that, somehow, the Democrats will squeak out a winner in the House, but his doubts are mounting. “I thought for sure the Democrats had it,” he said, “but then I listened to Charlie Cook, and he’s ringing a fire bell.”

On the other hand, on Thursday night I made an appearance on Stephanie Ruhle’s show on MSNBC. Before I was on set with CNBC’s Ron Insana, I got a chance to catch up with Mark McKinnon, the longtime Republican political advisor. He was wearing his trademark “Open Road” Stetson. He told me, in not so many words, that he was convinced that Kamala was going to win, and it wouldn’t really be that close. Here’s hoping he’s right. Sometimes, after all, Wall Street gets it wrong.