Good morning. Here's the latest on "Othello," Steve Bannon, Catherine Rampell, John Mulaney, Steve Liesman, the Washington Post, and much more...
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"With every passing day, it is harder to remember that Elon Musk was not always a political firebrand," The Atlantic's Ross Andersen writes this morning. "The old Musk advocated for his business interests and professed to care deeply about climate change, but he largely stayed out of partisan politics. As a result, he was much more popular." Remember when he hosted "SNL?"
Musk only endorsed Trump eight months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. Eight months ago!
Now Musk is so thoroughly "MAGA" that Trump opponents are targeting Tesla dealerships. Musk is giving gobs of money to promote Trump's agenda and Trump is giving Tesla free ads on the South Lawn.
Despite having control over one of the country's top social networks, Americans by and large aren't buying what Musk is selling. "Just 35% of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53% rating him negatively and 11% offering no opinion," according to CNN's newest poll conducted by SSRS.
"Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say that Musk has neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make changes to the way the government works," CNN's Ariel Edwards-Levy reports this morning. "There is uneasiness about Musk even among some of the president's supporters: 28% of those who see Trump's changes to the government as necessary doubt the tech billionaire has the judgment to carry them out."
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Last night's "NewsNight" perfectly illustrated how the left and right are talking past each other about Musk and DOGE. For example: When Trump booster Kevin O'Leary said he's proud that Musk is "finding the waste, the dripping fat," Biden vet Ashley Allison interjected, "I don't think that's what he's doing," since DOGE has been indiscriminately cutting and implementing Trump's ideological decrees.
O'Leary kept saying we should "whack more" while Van Lathan and Bakari Sellers kept bringing up child hunger to justify government spending. "And I have to remember," Sellers said, "that if we had a sharp decline in the stock market under Joe Biden," then Republicans' "hair would be on fire. It would be on Fox News 24/7..."
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>> Superb headline writing: "As stock slumps drain America’s 401(k)s, Trump props up his billionaire sidekick."
>> Late-night comedians had a lot of fun with Trump's Tesla commercial.
>> Steve Bannon is this week's guest on Gavin Newsom's podcast, and Bannon actually has some nice things to say about Musk.
>> What goes down... must go back up? Tesla shares are up more than 8% as the overall stock market attempts to rally this morning.
>> DOGE's purported savings are "grossly" inflated, Judd Legum says. His Musk Watch website has added a DOGE Tracker that finds "Musk has overstated verified DOGE savings by at least 92%."
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Newspaper publishers may feel tariff pain |
"Trump's tariffs are causing chaos for newspapers," as CJR fellow Sacha Biazzo reports here. Canada "provides an estimated 80% of the paper used by US newspapers," so "a tariff would add a significant burden to publishers already struggling with high costs of production and thin margins, and analysts say the mere looming threat of one has complicated life for printers." Read on...
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Liesman: 'Insanity is not a strategy' |
"CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman on Tuesday called Donald Trump's whiplash actions on tariffs 'insane,'" The Daily Beast notes.
Liesman, a 23-year veteran of the network, prefaced his remarks with "I'm going to say this at risk of my job." He said the White House's latest maneuver against Canada "is about the eighth reason we've had for the tariffs," adding that "insanity is not a strategy."
“The other thing that's not talked about," Liesman added, "is what's going on within the administration in terms of how they're treating the Constitution and laws. I think all of that is bad for the attraction of capital."
I can reliably say Liesman's job is not at risk. But, hey, CNBC has been must-see TV lately (if you can stomach the stock market gyrations) thanks to moments like that one...
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'How Trump is reshaping reality by hiding data' |
That's the title of this compelling new Washington Post opinion feature by Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell. They say "the Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases." Past admins have tried some of the same tricks, but "Trump’s statistical purges have been faster and more sweeping — picking off not just select factoids but entire troves of public information." Here's a gift link to the feature.
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The WH calls on The AP... |
...And then regrets it.
With a hearing in The AP's lawsuit against the Trump White House coming up next week, Karoline Leavitt called on The AP's Josh Boak at yesterday's briefing, and Boak asked about "tax hikes in the form of tariffs," leading Leavitt to preposterously call tariffs "a tax cut for the American people." The two went back and forth and Leavitt said "I now regret giving a question to the Associated Press." One of Leavitt's colleagues then attacked Boak on X, calling him an "activist," not a journalist, which meant he was flooded with media-bashing vitriol.
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>> There are now more than five million paid subscribers to newsletters across Substack, up from four million just four months ago, Alex Weprin reports. (THR)
>> Jodi Rudoren is returning to The New York Times as editorial director of newsletters. (NYT)
>> The aforementioned Catherine Rampell is joining MSNBC to co-host the evening edition of "The Weekend." (Variety)
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Ruth Marcus explains her Post exit |
Ruth Marcus is out with a new piece for The New Yorker less than 48 hours after resigning from the Washington Post. The longtime Post columnist explains why she left the Jeff Bezos-owned publication — "my job is supposed to be to tell you what I think, not what Jeff Bezos thinks I should think" — and shares the (mild-mannered) column that was rejected by Post publisher Will Lewis. It pains her to say that "the Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not the Washington Post I left."
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'Othello' sets a new Broadway record |
"In only its second week of previews," Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal's revival of "Othello" "seems to be Broadway's newest hot ticket," Playbill's Logan Culwell-Block reports. Last week "Othello" set a new record for "the highest-grossing week of any Broadway play in history, beating Harry Potter and the Cursed Child's record from 2023." The steep ticket prices are becoming a story...
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A 'next generation late-night show' |
"John Mulaney returns to Netflix tonight with what can legitimately be called a next generation late-night show," LateNighter's Bill Carter writes. "For starters, his show is being streamed not just nationally but globally, and it can be seen live everywhere someone has plunked down coin to subscribe to Netflix." That's 10 p.m. in New York, but "for those who keep to the strict TV time period definition of 'late night,' the show starts at 11pm in Bermuda." The show will stream for the next twelve Wednesdays...
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Entertainment odds and ends |
>> Yesterday we cast Tony Hinchcliffe's Netflix comedy deal as an example of the entertainment world embracing MAGA-adjacent content. Peter Kafka disagrees with that framing; he argues that the shift toward Hinchcliffe's "deliberately transgressive comedy" has been going on for years. (Business Insider)
>> Several major YouTubers — including Mr. Beast, Dude Perfect and Ryan Trahan — will "host their own upfront-style event later this month in a bid to lure marketing dollars from traditional TV to creator-driven content." (THR)
>> Disney is scaling back this weekend's "Snow White" red carpet premiere amid "controversies" around the film. (Variety)
>> Kendrick Lamar's "GNX" returned to the top spot on the Billboard 200 for a third nonconsecutive week. (Billboard)
>> Billy Joel "is postponing a number of concerts so that he can recover from surgery and 'undergo physical therapy under the supervision of his doctors.'" Get well soon, Piano Man! (Pitchfork)
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