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Good morning,
Thanks for reading The Backstory—our weekly digest of the best work being produced at Puck.
I know I say this all the time, but it was another incredible week here at Puck: Dylan Byers captured the renewed anxiety inside CNN; Tara Palmeri previewed the new cast of characters in Trumpworld; Teddy Schleifer broke the news on Hillary Clinton’s next move; Matt Belloni and Julia Alexander picked apart Disney’s Star Wars conundrum; Eriq Gardner explored a legal family feud; Julia Ioffe penetrated Tehran’s politics; and Bill Cohan envisioned the next Treasury secretary.
Check out these stories, along with the rest of our best work from the week, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.
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| It was only six years ago, but it’s hard to quite recall the meteoric, Kardashian-like impact that Donald Trump’s coterie of advisors—the body men, the hangers-on, carny acts, golf partners, old New York pals, and little buddies—had upon the culture when he was elected president in 2016. If you asked most Americans to name a sitting president’s cabinet or top advisors, they would likely stare into the distance and scratch their temple. And yet here we were, living in an age when even the politically tongue-tied could cite Hope Hicks and Steve Bannon; when Kellyanne Conway was a regular subject of SNL parody; when Anthony Scaramucci was legitimately world famous for a fortnight.
The stars of this cast, inevitably, were Trump’s own family members: the ruthlessly ambitious Jared and Ivanka, the pugilistic and self-infatuated Don Jr., the opportunistic Eric, and then Tiffany off to the side. It was such a sharp-elbowed, zero sum, vote-em-off-the-island set-up that the terms “reality show” and “civil war” had become platitudinous within days of the commencement of his administration.
Over the course of his four year term, few outside Javanka, former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had the stamina to endure it all. After all, the chaos—the Muslim Ban, Charlottesville, the Mueller saga, Kavanaugh, and so forth—had torn the crew apart. Even Elaine Chao, a near lifer at Transportation, called it quits after January 6th. Brad Parscale, whose profile ascended more than perhaps any other star in the Trump constellation, found a way to stay in Trump’s good graces until the election math said otherwise. Mike Pence essentially turned in his Trumpworld card shortly after certifying the election by building his own 2024 campaign architecture in relatively open view.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and Trumpworld makes for even stranger ones. Interestingly, and perhaps not all that surprisingly, few appear poised for another round. As Tara Palmeri brilliantly reports in Trump ’24 Foreplay, Trump’s kids are either satisfied with their public service or consumed with their own fiefdoms. Some old hands like Parscale and Jason Miller may be vendors and sounding boards, but not much more. Instead, we’ll be introduced to a new set of characters, like Susie Wiles, the Florida expert and elite MAGA operative, and Chris LaCivita, who Tara says is the early frontrunner to be Trump’s campaign manager. (Wiles will assume more of a Podesta-like role.) LaCivita may not be known to the broader culture, but his work sure is. He was the architect of the Swift Boats campaign that destroyed John Kerry’s presidential ambitions.
Unsurprisingly, Tara notes, there is already some agitation inside the pre-campaign braintrust. As we know from Trump’s history, of course, the first team is rarely the final one. Indeed, Trump ’24 Foreplay articulates an enduring truth about our political media-industrial complex: the characters change but the plot often remains the same. It’s the leitmotif of our time, and precisely the sort of story you can only find at Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
