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Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon delivery of Puck’s best new
reporting.

First up today, Dylan Byers chronicles the fresh tumult inside CBS News as editorial chief Adrienne Roark is shown the door and C.E.O. Wendy McMahon’s fate at the network hangs in the balance. Plus, the chatter swirling among Politico insiders as Alex Burns ascends to “senior executive editor”—and Josh Harris’s clear heir
apparent. 

Plus, below the fold: Leigh Ann Caldwell exposes the quiet anxiety percolating through the G.O.P. over the DOGE agenda. Rachel Strugatz explores how makeup-artist-led beauty brands are transforming the industry. Bill Cohan surveys seasoned Wall Street executives already changing their tune about Trump II. And exclusive for
Inner Circle members, Marion Maneker sits down with prominent Dallas art collectors Howard Rachofsky and Thomas Hartland-Mackie to discuss their hybrid exhibition space.

Meanwhile, on the pods: Matt Belloni rings up Severance producer Chris Rice on The Town to unravel the current state of financing and producing independent television. On Somebody’s Gotta
Win, Tara Palmeri is joined by Senator Jim Banks to scrutinize Trump’s chaotic first month. And on The Powers That Be, Peter Hamby connects with Tara to debate whether Elon Musk is actually an asset to Trump, or merely a disposable instrument for his slash-and-burn agenda. 

MEDIA

On Wednesday, CBS News editorial and newsgathering chief Adrienne Roark told staff that she would be leaving after
just seven months on the job—yet another blemish on the embattled network and, by extension, its chief executive, Wendy McMahon. Sources close to the new leadership group at Skydance tell Dylan that McMahon will almost certainly lose her job as head of the news division after the Paramount-Skydance merger. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Politico founding editor John Harris announced that Alex Burns would be ascending up the org chart to become the new “senior executive editor.” “Burns irks a lot of
folks in the newsroom but IMO he is the right pick,” emailed one insider, perhaps best summarizing the situation.

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WASHINGTON

When the cameras are rolling, congressional Republicans are ostensibly on board with the budget-slashing and
government-shrinking blitzkrieg being directed by Donald Trump and his partner Elon Musk. In private, though, G.O.P. lawmakers are starting to worry over the likely impact of severe cuts on their own states, constituents, and of course, political careers. Alabama Senator Katie Britt, the young ascendant Republican, has been working aggressively behind the scenes to protect her state’s funding; Kansas Senator Jerry Moran has called on the administration to continue the Food for Peace program,
which subsidizes U.S. farmers to produce hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of food each year through USAID. If the law can’t rein Trump and Elon in, perhaps a quiet lobbying campaign can?

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FASHION

In recent years, several top makeup artists have been able to capitalize on their A-list client relationships and
media exposure to build formidable brands. Indeed, makeup now accounts for the largest share of revenue at Sephora, which, as Rachel reports, is really getting behind Violette Serrat’s Violette_FR, which is set to launch in 65 stores in the coming days, with a planned rollout of close to 250 doors by year’s end. In December, Serrat raised a Series B led by Silas Capital—and while a liquidity event is almost always the ultimate goal, Violette_FR doesn’t feel like it was created for the
purpose of scaling and flipping it to a strategic. That’s a rarity in this industry, or any industry, really.

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WALL STREET

A realpolitik chill has settled across the world of high finance. As one particularly sober Wall Street executive
told Bill, “I see inflation ticking up. I see interest rates still elevated. I see jitters in the equity markets.” More urgently, he continued, the promised “investment banking bonanza” is not yet materializing. Other Wall Street insiders, like the billionaire businessman Steve Cloobeck, lamented Trump’s infatuation with Elon. “It’s sad,” he told Bill. “because, as strong as he is, we found his kryptonite. Everything’s about money and greed.” Is this the first rumbling of the Democratic
resistance reconstituting itself, yet again, for a more conservative era—or just more wishful thinking?

Read Now

ART

Howard Rachofsky founded The Warehouse in 2012 with a dual purpose: to store his massive art collection, but also to
serve as an exhibition and education space for the community in Dallas. Lately, though, he’s been focused on The Warehouse’s future. As he tells Marion, he’s pragmatic—but he’s also 80. So last year, he teamed up with his friend and sometime canasta buddy, fellow collector Thomas Hartland-Mackie—who also has a strong connection to Dallas’s collaborative art community—and created The Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation to jointly operate The Warehouse. Marion sits down with Hartland-Mackie and
Rachofsky for a close look at their foundation’s first exhibition, the origins of The Warehouse, its education focus, and its next phase.

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HOLLYWOOD

Matt is joined by Chris Rice, co-founder and co-C.E.O. of Fifth Season, and producer of Apple TV+’s
Severance, to discuss what happens when a TV show goes overbudget and how to manage it, who ends up footing the bill, reasons for overages, setting the budget for seasons of TV, and the current state of financing and producing independent television. Matt finishes the episode with an opening weekend box office prediction for The Monkey.

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WASHINGTON

Tara is joined by freshman senator Jim Banks (R-Indiana) to discuss Trump’s policy decisions in the first month of
his second term, including whether he views Elon Musk as a conflict of interest for the Trump administration, his level of concern over potential tariffs hitting his home state, what to make of the MAHA movement, and his thoughts on whether the G.O.P.’s upcoming tax cuts will continue to benefit corporations and billionaires over working people.

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WASHINGTON

Tara Palmeri joins Peter to debate whether Elon Musk is really an asset to Donald Trump, or merely a disposable
instrument for his slash-and-burn agenda. According to exclusive new polling, it all depends on how voters perceive what he’s doing: Is he an unelected, self-serving carpetbagger or a crusader for government efficiency? Either way, it seems like Trump is happy to have him… for now.

Listen Now

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