There’s a big and very long piece this morning about the travails of The Washington Post published at The Atlantic. It’s a reported piece by media reporter Brian Stelter. There’s a lot there. It runs almost ten thousand words. But the gist seems pretty clear, which is that the new villain is Jeff Bezos. “Villain” is a bit strong, certainly. What I really mean is Jeff Bezos as the root of the problem, a realization that some at the Post appear to be coming around to. And not because he’s done anything bad. By all accounts he’s been entirely legit on editorial non-interference. Write whatever you want about me and Amazon, etc.

The issue is that the Post essentially has an absentee, hands-off owner. And that has created perhaps not a vacuum at the top, but a lack of direction. Executives who weren’t getting the job done were kept around too long. Other executives were hired to shake things up but they weren’t the right fit. Now you have a CEO and publisher, Will Lewis, whose tenure is clearly and perhaps fatally damaged by the mix of staff revolt and miscellaneous scandals. And yet he’s still in place while Bezos is touring the Greek isles on his mega-yacht with his fiancee.

Let me share a few thoughts on tonight’s debate.

Needless to say, we will be providing live coverage of tonight’s debate and commentary and discussion afterwards. Depending on how everything shakes out, we may record a quick instapod version of The Josh Marshall Podcast Featuring Kate Riga to discuss our initial reactions.

In the old days, when we had two more or less professional politicians debating each other, the debates had a certain degree of predictability. There might be gaffes or gotcha moments. But the room for really big surprises was limited. That’s not where we are anymore. Now we have one candidate, Trump, who knows no bounds and will try to do everything he can to disrupt the proceedings or throw the other participants back on their heels. He brings his pro-wrestling mentality right onto the stage. Meanwhile, Democrats go into these affairs in spite of themselves terrified that Biden will have some gaffe or senior moment that will send his campaign into a terminal tailspin. Both of these factors together create a feeling of maximal unpredictability and tension — and moments like that are Donald Trump’s happy place.

From TPM Reader JS on the Idaho abortion decision which was unofficially released today.

Don’t miss the big issue here: There were four votes to decide the case on the merits, Justice Jackson along with Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch. Jackson says she’d vote in favor of abortion rights and the latter say they’d vote against. Five Justices, however, voted to dismiss the case altogether and essentially punt for another day (but dissolve the stay on the district court’s injunction). Among those five are Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. Had just one of them voted in favor of deciding the case, the Court would HAVE to reach the merits. So that tells us that Kagan and Sotomayor believed the merits would have gone against abortion rights. While I understand their decision, I have to say I strongly disagree with it. They should have forced the Court to decide the issue, rather than let Roberts push it off to a non-election year. Sure, this will temporarily help women in Idaho, but allowing Roberts and his colleagues to gut further abortion rights AFTER the election is a long-term bad thing. I commend Justice Jackson for recognizing this.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh prepare for the first debate and the flood of Supreme Court decisions amid which it’ll happen.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

One of the things I’ve enjoyed — one of the many — about your lists of your favorite Editors’ Blog posts is being reminded of ones I’d mostly forgotten about. Your favorites and mine too tend not to be about political news. They’re more about ideas about politics or history. That makes sense since the pieces about political news are the most ephemeral. The ones about broader observations or theories and commentary retain some relevance over time. This morning TPM Reader RL — the same one who wrote in about NY-16 — followed up and pointed to this 2017 piece on Bob Dylan’s three Christian albums — 1979–1981. I enjoyed writing that and and reading it again going on a decade later.

We got the result that vibes, conventional wisdom and limited polling — always questionable in a low-turnout primary — led us to expect in NY-16: Rep. Jamaal Bowman went down to a decisive bordering on overwhelming defeat. Current results give County Executive George Latimer 58% of the vote to Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s 42%. “Current” isn’t a throwaway line. The results I’m looking at say that is 88% of the vote. New York is notoriously, verging on comically, slow to count votes. You don’t hear about it as much as you should because we don’t have a lot of high-profile national races, though last cycle and this one we will have a handful of House races that could well determine who controls the House.

I just got this note from TPM Reader RL who lives in NY-16 and says he just voted for Latimer. He brings up something that didn’t figure in my piece at all: the fire alarm. I’d always written off the idea that Bowman was trying to delay that vote. It simply didn’t make sense to me. It seemed like he was in a rush. The door was locked. And he pulled the fire alarm to unlock the door. RL says it actually played a significant role in his vote, not because it was a huge deal in itself but because it was just dumb and made him a story when the GOP was imploding. As I told RL, perhaps it’s the same difference. It you’re in a rush and a door is locked, setting off a fire alarm in a large office building is not a smart thing to do. Terrible judgment and possibly even dangerous. It just seems like the kind of move, whatever the motivation, that is very much a Jamaal Bowman thing that you’d never see Hakeem Jeffries, Dan Goldman or AOC doing. Just not ready for prime time, quite apart from ideology.

Now RL …

We hear a lot that the press is making all the same mistakes with Donald Trump that it did back in 2016. There are certainly many ways this is the case. But not in all the ways. Indeed, I think Trump has perversely and paradoxically benefited from one thing most news organizations have done very differently. They don’t carry his speeches live. They don’t report all his latest nonsense. I think this has been a net plus for him, especially in a rematch with Biden, since there’s less reminder of just how out there, unhinged and violence-inciting he is. That benefit is only starting to ebb now as we’re getting into the meat of the campaign proper and people really are hearing a lot of it. Thursday night’s debate will bring that to the fore.

Which brings us to the debate.

One thing I’m very curious about is whether certain parts of Trump’s schtick will just seem stale the third time.

I was reading a piece in Axios this morning that happened not only to be smart but also erudite. Surprise! When I looked at the byline: Felix Salmon. Okay, not a surprise. Axios actually publishes a lot of good stuff outside its narrowly political content. There’s good stuff there too. But on politics it’s mostly narrowly captive to DC conventional wisdom and conceits. But to the good Felix Salmon piece: he compares billionaire and business giving to and support of Trump to Pascal’s Wager: It makes sense to believe in God because if God exists you’ll be glad you did and if he doesn’t exist it won’t matter.

Salmon makes the point that high-profile business leaders have a big incentive to support Trump even if they want him to lose or at least think Biden would be a better President or better for the economy. If Trump wins your personal support could end up mattering a lot to your business or your company and vice versa. If Biden wins, he’s not going to try to retaliate against you for supporting Trump. Not how the Biden folks operate. This is a bit far fetched but I could even see how you might have a fiduciary responsibility to support Trump for just the same reason. I know it’s a bit more complicated than that. But the effect on your bottom line could be very, very real.

If you are an Inside member, you’re familiar with the Inside Briefings we’ve done over the years. We’re launching a new kind of briefing: Inside TPM. This will be a series of monthly interviews with TPM staffers (and down the road, potentially alumni and friends-of-site) to help readers and viewers and listeners better understand TPM and the people who work here.

In the first episode, I spoke with Josh Kovensky about covering the Trump hush money trial, what he learned from his time in Ukraine, and much more. I hope you enjoy and we’ll be back next month with another video.