A bit more on my love/hate relationship with Puck. As I said in today’s Backchannel, it’s a curious mix of the very best and the very worst. But as I also noted, it’s helpful to keep an eye on the worst because they can have a lot of influence. Occasionally you can even learn something. Which brings me to Tara Palmeri of Puck. Her dispatch on Trump’s conviction is just drenched in the contempt in which she holds all Democrats. After listing off Republicans’ absolute and total unity behind Trump she says this: “Ironically, it’s the Democrats who seem confused about how to handle Trump’s newly minted felon designation.”

Let’s go back a few more days to our earlier discussion of this. The roar of rage and total confidence in Trump has two purposes. The one is to keep Republicans on side. The other is to make Democrats doubt the obvious: that Trump’s new first name, “convicted felon,” is bad news for his campaign. And the more it’s flogged and made his official first name, the worse it is. We don’t know how bad it is. We don’t know how many voters it will move. But it’s definitely not good. So saying it over and over again and putting it at the heart of the campaign against him is certainly a good thing. Again, that’s most of the goal of the Republican fusillade: to raise doubt about that completely obvious point.

The news pages are filled today with D-Day anniversary messages and accounts. It’s 80 years ago. So we’re at the outer rim of time where anyone there that day must be in their late 90s at the youngest. The thing that seems most important to remember is that it was not clear that it would work. The death, the fear, the terror, the sacrifice all take on a certain hue and logic because we know it was a success that would open the door for the reconquest of Europe. But that wasn’t clear at the time. You’ve probably seen references in the anniversary stories to the message Ike prepared to announce the landing’s failure.

From an anonymous reader on what this person calls the “bored billionaire” syndrome. I think this is very on the mark for what the billionaire savior wants to accomplish when they rescue a struggling publication and why they often get tetchy pretty quickly.

I wanted to add to your post about the situation at the Washington Post. If I worked there, the thing I would be most worried right now is that Bezos has entered a very familiar and dangerous phase of his ownership for the newsroom. I call it the “bored billionaire” stage and, in my case, it comes from lived experience.

New billionaires don’t buy money-losing publications as charities whose losses they are willing to underwrite because they believe those publications ought to keep existing. (Old billionaires did: the Fleishmans and then the Newhouses with The New Yorker, the Hedermans and the New York Review, Marty Peretz — via his wife’s Singer inheritance — and The New Republic, etc.) 

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the verdict and fallout for convicted felon Donald Trump.

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

We’ve now got the brass’s take on the shake-up at The Washington Post via Dylan Byers at Puck. I subscribe to Puck, and some of the people there are extremely good. Others I read because I want to know what *those* people are thinking. Dylan Byers is in that category for me. He covers media but in a very corporate, rah-rah, mergery, no-actual-interest-in-journalism kind of way. William Cohan covers the titans for Puck too. But I always learn a lot from his reports. Byers is out now with his report on what happened. In his version of events, Buzbee, the departed executive editor, was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, the kind of serious and well-meaning editor you’d expect at the head of a dying institution. Indeed, she was so not a player that, in his account, she participated in the planning for the Post’s new direction, creating a “third newsroom” and such, without realizing until the last minute that it was in part an effort to ease her out. So not a player.

If you’re a subscriber, read his account and if you’re not I think you can read the article by, like, giving them your email. The are two points which suffuse his account and which he in various places states explicitly. The first is that the British newspaper execs have “swagger” and the current Post lacks “swagger” and needs it desperately. Buzbee is a fine editor but lacks “swagger.” She came from the AP, as he notes. How can you have less “swagger”? The second is that the Biden era is boring — “somnolent,” as he puts it — and lacks the “go-go” excitement of the Trump era.