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Happy Monday and welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon
compendium of Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Leigh Ann Caldwell probes House Democrats’ inner dialogue as they face this week’s vote on Mike Johnson’s Trump-endorsed bill to avoid a government shutdown. In true Democratic fashion, the party is wrestling with itself over how to proceed—and whether approving the bill would be perceived by voters
as endorsing Elon Musk’s chainsaw approach to dismantling the federal agencies.

Plus, below the fold: Dylan Byers digs into David Shipley’s auto-defenestration from The Washington Post amid Jeff Bezos’s editorial shake-up. Bill Cohan contemplates Trump’s quixotic Fort Knox–style Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Julie Davich profiles Dimepiece founder Brynn Wallner, the woman single-handedly reshaping the traditionally buttoned-up world of watch collecting. And Sarah Shapiro offers a tactical assessment of T.J. Maxx’s retail durability.

Meanwhile, on the pods: John Heilemann rings up The New York Times’s M. Gessen on
Impolitic to unpack Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin and what it portends for Ukraine and Europe. On The Varsity, John Ourand connects with NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman to discuss the league’s exploding popularity and gargantuan media rights deals. And on The Powers That Be, Jon Kelly reunites with Peter Hamby to debate whether David Zaslav’s Warner Bros.
Discovery is finally turning a corner.

P.S.: Tomorrow afternoon, Bill is hosting an exclusive lunch for Inner Circle members in Midtown Manhattan, co-hosted by the celebrated astronaut José Hernández and the space tourism company Zero-G. There are a few very limited spots available, so upgrade your account and email
Fritz@puck.news to get on the list. One lucky guest will win a seat on an upcoming Zero-G flight—which Bill can tell you all about. Good luck!

The Democratic Party, still disoriented from Trump’s address to Congress last Tuesday night,
remains as directionless and leaderless as modern memory affords. And now, it must countenance its first real legislative challenge of Trump II. With government funding set to run out at midnight on Friday, the balkanized Dems find themselves at a sort of philosophical crossroads: Joining Republicans to pass a bill extending government funding carries risks that no one seems able to pre-game, and could also be seen as a tactical endorsement of Elon Musk’s DOGE experiment, but nuking the
bill would also prompt significant fallout. How should they approach their first big consequential act of resistance under the new Republican regime?

Read Now

In hindsight, the mismanagement of endorsement-gate foreshadowed the far more significant
changes that Bezos made to the Washington Post Opinion section last week, when he declared that the paper’s once-legendary editorial page would now only vigorously support and defend “personal liberties and free markets.” The new mandate set off yet another round of impassioned protest from the Marty Baron–David Maraniss crowd and triggered the resignation of the Post’s Opinion editor, David Shipley. But the truth is that Bezos had been
antsy about the paper’s ideological leanings for years, and according to sources familiar with his thinking, he’s long wanted to bring the paper closer in line with his own free market, libertarian worldview. Can Bezos and his C.E.O., Will Lewis, identify a new Opinion leader who displays enthusiasm for the mandate?

Read Now

Medicines are the one part of health care where costs go down over time.  

America’s intellectual property (IP) system is designed to make medicines more affordable for patients through innovative research, brand competition and lower-cost generics. Today, 90% of prescriptions are filled with lower-cost generic and biosimilar medicines. 

Learn more.

Even among the crypto industry’s biggest cheerleaders, there are reservations about Trump’s
announcement last Thursday that the United States is creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Is this akin to the strategic gold reserve we’ve had for generations at Fort Knox, or the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, an emergency supply of crude oil? Is it just another of Trump’s many self-serving business stunts, akin to the launch of his $TRUMP memecoin, from which he’s already made more than $300 million? Or is there some real substance behind what Trump and David Sacks—the investor, All-In
podcaster, alt-right intellectual celebrity, and newly anointed “crypto czar”—have created with their so-called Digital Asset Stockpile?

Read Now

Brynn Wallner, better known as @dimepiece, has some 56,000 Instagram followers who devour her
female-forward watch content, and is among the watch enthusiasts remaking a staid (and traditionally very male) collecting community. As Julie notes, thanks in part to influencers like Wallner, women have become a fast-growing sector among luxury watch buyers and wearers—and watchmakers are now trying to play catch-up. “Her opinion has had effects on all aspects of the watch world,” said luxury dealer and Graal founder Zoë Abelson. “On the perspectives of consumers and collectors, on brands
listening to what people want to wear, and on secondary-market trends.”

Read Now

Stores are always looking for strategies to create foot traffic in this mobile shopping world.
One tactic, of course, is to limit your online presence. T.J. Maxx, for instance, had the highest foot traffic in the eastern United States last quarter, in part because new merchandise arrives every week—you have to actually walk into a store to see the latest. Sure, the “Thrill of the Retail Hunt” strategy predates C.E.O. Ernie Herrman, but it’s especially retro amid an era where everything is online. As one analyst pointed out to Sarah, given their strong earnings in the last
fiscal quarter, T.J. Maxx wins no matter what the economy seems to be doing. Plus, Sarah digs into The North Face’s surprising runway collaboration in Paris, Savette’s no-logo-but-you-know handbags, and the rise of drawstring jeans.

Read
Now

John is joined by New York Times opinion columnist M. Gessen to discuss Donald Trump’s
affinity for Vladimir Putin and what it means for Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine, and the whole of Europe. Gessen, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, contends it’s now crystal clear that the U.S. has switched sides in the war in Ukraine (and offers a number of entwined explanations as to Trump’s motives for doing so); that Putin’s larger territorial/imperial ambitions are rooted in his fixation on the 1945 Yalta Accords
and the framework established there by F.D.R., Stalin, and Churchill; and that Europe’s swift and dramatic response to Trump’s turn against Zelensky may prove as historic as the other paradigm-shifting events of the past fortnight.

Listen
Now

Medicines are the one part of health care where costs go down over time.  

America’s intellectual property (IP) system is designed to make medicines more affordable for patients through innovative research, brand competition and lower-cost generics. Today, 90% of prescriptions are filled with lower-cost generic and biosimilar medicines. 

Learn more.

NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman joins John for a deep dive into the league’s burgeoning
popularity following a record-breaking season in attendance and TV viewership. She highlights the power of storytelling in building cultural relevance, before pulling back the curtain on the league’s massive media rights deals with ESPN, CBS, and Amazon Prime—a game-changing 40-fold increase in game sales. Jessica also weighs in on the impact of high-profile international transfers, like Naomi Girma’s $1.1 million move to Chelsea.

Listen Now

Jon Kelly and Peter huddle up for a close look at David Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery, which,
after three years of P.R. crises, tough management calls, and chipping away at its colossal debt, is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Jon and Peter also weigh into the Democrats’ evolving media strategy as they grapple with the primacy of digital media and capturing voters’ attention beyond traditional TV.

Listen Now

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