Good morning,

 

Welcome back to the dog days, and thank you for spending some of your pre-Labor Day respite with us. As you may recall from my previous notes, I’m Jon Kelly, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Puck, our new media company focused on the nexus of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood. And for all of you new subscribers, it’s a pleasure to meet you electronically. 

 

You’re receiving this email because you subscribe to one or more of the private emails written by Puck’s amazing team of journalists—Matthew Belloni, Julia Ioffe, Baratunde Thurston, Teddy Schleifer, Tina Nguyen, William D. Cohan, Peter Hamby, and Dylan Byers. Thanks for your support. We hope that you like what you’ve been reading. There is so much more great work to come.

 

I’ll be writing this email every Saturday to provide some of the backstory on either a particular piece of journalism from the past week or some behind-the-scenes development at our growing company, itself. And for the next few weeks, I’ll also be offering you a tremendous discount to join our community before our official launch, which takes place shortly after Labor Day. 

 

But, first!: I want to direct your attention to some of the most exceptional journalism that Puck, in beta mode, has been publishing of late.

 

HOLLYWOOD:

Matt Belloni, the one and only, reports on Hollywood’s stunning vaccine headache—and what studios can do about actors who haven’t taken the jab.

 

WASHINGTON:

This Peter Hamby joint on the California recall dilemma explains better than any other piece I’ve read why Gavin Newsom is in deep, deep trouble. 

 

SILICON VALLEY:

Is America ready for its first trillionaire? As Teddy Schleifer notes, the question isn’t as absurd as it sounds.

 

WALL STREET:

A twofer: Bill Cohan offers a deeply revealing interview with Wall Street’s legendary doomsday king; meanwhile, Baratunde Thurston perspicaciously rewrites the billionaire tax code.

 

And yet there’s one more great story that I want to tell you about, too.

Five years ago, I was holed up in an underwhelming, big-chain commuter hotel in Mountain View, California, not too far from the famous Google campus. The joint was remarkably, almost humorously bleak. Silicon Valley, for all its wealth and splendor, is actually a surprising accomodation desert, unless you shell out for the Rosewood, and the stunning towns that line the broader 101 corridor can be inhospitable to business travelers. Anyway, I was in and out for work, and it wasn’t worth it to suffer through the traffic up the peninsula to San Francisco, so I passed the time binge-watching cable news and working, myself.

 

It was late 2016, in that acute moment when half of America was coming to terms with the forthcoming Trump presidency and the other half—long latent or even invisible to the people who made much of popular media—was gleefully basking in their upset victory. No matter their tribe, it seemed like we all tuned in daily as cavalcades of well-wishers, sycophants, weirdos, Kanye West, Jack Ma, and the Naked Cowboy mingled in the lobby of Trump Tower, posed for cameras, and ascended the gold-plated elevator to kiss the president-elect’s ring. It was an eerie, stage-managed carnival that presaged the uncharted territory that our democracy, and culture, had entered.

 

Those were surreal days, and as I watched on endless loop, I was transfixed by one tangential detail. As most of the Trump pals exited the lobby, there was a barely discernible awning in the background for Trump Grill, Trump Tower’s plaza-level bistro. 

 

What was Trump Grill? I’d seen Trump vodka, I’d watched The Apprentice. But an entire menu in that godawful building, catered to the barbaric culinary tastes of the president? I was appalled, but also intrigued.

 

With nothing much to do, I sent a note to Tina Nguyen, a brilliant young reporter that I had started working with at The Hive, a business I had recently cofounded at Condé Nast. Unlike most of us in the media, Tina hadn’t been caught off guard by Trump’s election. In fact, she’d seen the distinct possibility more clearly and presciently than anyone I had known. She told me about it daily. Too often, I brushed it off, assuming this was the classic case of a bulldog reporter homed in on their beat. 

 

But Tina saw around corners when it came to the Republican Party. She had, after all, travelled a strange but educational sojourn in grassroots conservatism during her formative years: she’d gone to Claremont, found herself working under Tucker Carlson at The Daily Caller, and met many of the most influential fringe characters who would soon ascend to popular rightwing messiahdom in the Trump vortex. She understood, more than anyone, how misinformation and dogmas at the bottom of the movement now had a dog-whistling advocate in the White House.

 

Moreover, Tina was a foodie. She loved to cook, and had a sophisticated palette. A week later, Tina published the brilliant and hilarious and timeless, Trump Grill May Be the Worst Restaurant in America—one part restaurant review, another part metaphorical distillation of how this unsavory culinary institution presaged the ways the executive branch was about to head off-menu:

 

The allure of Trump’s restaurant, like the candidate, is that it seems like a cheap version of rich. The inconsistent menus—literally, my menu was missing dishes that I found on my dining partners’—were chock-full of steakhouse classics doused with unnecessarily high-end ingredients. The dumplings, for instance, come with soy sauce topped with truffle oil, and the crostini is served with both hummus and ricotta, two exotic ingredients that should still never be combined. The menu itself would like to impress diners with how important it is, randomly capitalizing fancy words like “Prosciutto” and “Julienned” (and, strangely, “House Salad”).

The morning we published the piece, Trump tweeted that our publication was going to shrivel up and die. 

The greatest reporters have guts, and Tina has them in spades. Not only did she emerge from the roots of conservative media with an uncanny insight into its origin and vision of its future, she put up with the sort of agita that would have felled many other journalists. Last week, she reported on MyPillow C.E.O. and Trump buddy Mike Lindell’s bonkers “cybersecurity summit” in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Not only did she endure insults and invective from media-hating attendees, she nailed the story about what is really taking place on the front lines of the conservative movement—and how it is already manifesting itself in the earliest acts of the 2024 election, whether Trump decides to run again or not.

 

For the next few weeks, Tina will be touring the nation, pulling in to hot spots on the conservative map—not just Sioux Falls but also rural Idaho, Tulsa, Staten Island, and various dots along the way in Indiana and Florida. She’ll also be reporting from Southern California. It might surprise you to know that the greater L.A. area, despite its well-known politics, is the Constantinople of the modern MAGA movement.

 

This week, I want to call you your attention to a recent dispatch from her road trip. It’s all about the incipient movement among a new generation of Republicans, such as Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley, to inherit the Trump mantle. (Mike Pence is already toast, Tina tells me, but maybe you already knew that.) The detail that shocked me most? The Gordian knot that Trump has tied his supplicants into. 

 

Assuming Trump doesn’t run again, any Republican with an ambition to win over his base will have to simultaneously position themselves as the former president’s second coming while noting that he never lost in the first place. The Big Lie, Tina writes, is about to become a canonical G.O.P. issue, like taxes and certain cultural touchstones. I highly recommend that any engaged citizen read this piece now. Tina’s reporting, in my view, is becoming a national utility.

 

That’s all for now. See you next Saturday.

 

Happy reading,

Jon

 

P.S. - If you'd like to unlock early access to all of the benefits of a Puck membership, you can learn more here (bonus: get 25% off for being an early reader).