Greetings from Los Angeles. It’s been something to watch the G.O.P. convention in Milwaukee this week and see conservative media stars like Tucker Carlson and David Sacks feature so prominently in the programming. One wonders if we’re one campaign cycle away from seeing Rachel Maddow show up on the Democratic convention stage. Speaking of which, Maddow and most of her MSNBC colleagues are decidedly not in Milwaukee this week. The Times has confirmed that that’s an LED screen. Not since John McEnroe revealed he was calling the Australian Open from Bristol has late-stage linear television felt so depressing.

Speaking of MSNBC, in tonight’s email we go inside 30 Rock for a gut check on the angst and anxiety of the hosts who are struggling to cover the Democrats’ existential Biden crisis without alienating their liberal audiences. Plus, the backstory on the strange Morning Joe preemption that left Joe, Mika, and Willie chafing at Cesar Conde.

But first…

📺 Last chance to Vance: Sources in Trumpland tell me they anticipate that the campaign will agree to CBS News’s proposed vice presidential debate, which would pit J.D. Vance against Kamala Harris (at least for now) sometime this summer, likely on August 13. The Biden-Harris camp has already agreed to the debate and reiterated its interest this week. The Trump campaign had initially sought to do a V.P. debate on Fox News, which the Biden campaign had declined.

🛥️ A new-money media sighting in Nantucket, via my partner Bill Cohan: Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy is one of those only-in-America but also really only-outside-of-Boston success stories: Decades ago, he started an underground alternative zine that he pivoted into an anti-politically correct, eye-poking sorta MAGA-adjacent bro-tastic sports and lifestyle media company that famously reviewed pizza slices on the East Coast. It was almost a Pat McAfee version of Grantland, the beloved and dearly departed Bill Simmons property from the aughts.

Then Portnoy, who hails from coastal Swampscott, Massachusetts, enjoyed a series of liquidity events. First, he sold a controlling position in Barstool to The Chernin Group for reportedly a little less than $10 million in 2016. Four years later, he enjoyed a second windfall when gaming concern Penn Entertainment took over the company in a deal worth $450 million. Then, last year, Portnoy bought the whole shebang back for $1 after Penn had to quickly divest—the company projected an $800 million loss during its stewardship—in order to complete a partnership venture with ESPN, which may have wanted nothing to do with the man known as El Pres (and who many people consider to be a real Masshole). Anyway, it all added up to a boatload of money for Portnoy. Last year, he paid $44 million, the highest price ever, for an oceanfront estate in Nantucket, edging out the likes of billionaires John Henry, who paid $42 million for his place, and Steve Schwarzman ($32 million for his Nantucket waterfront estate), and me.

Alas, over the weekend, we “almost lost Captain Dave,” as he referred to himself in an Instagram video recounting his fateful decision to take his modest 27-foot motorboat out for a spin, with his mother as the only passenger. He unhooked the boat from its mooring in the Nantucket harbor and then started drifting in the heavy winds that were buffeting the island. Unfortunately for Captain Dave, he failed to check whether the boat’s engines were working before he unmoored it. They weren’t. His radio wasn’t working either. “Captain Dave was almost lost to mother ocean,” he said in the post. “No power, no radio, no anchor, no nothing. Heavy, heavy winds and next thing you know, Captain Dave is lost at sea. Just blowing, trying not to crash into ships in the harbor.” He sent up a flare, from a flare gun, which he happened to have on the boat. “Captain Dave is not really a flare gun guy, or any other type of fireworks guy. Captain Dave shoots his fucking gun into the sky. Distress signal. Still nothing.”

The next thing he knew, “some girl” in “what looks like a rowboat” came by to help Captain Dave and Mama Dave. She climbed aboard his boat and asked him to film a TikTok with her. “No time,” he said. Instead, she called in the Coast Guard—“four burly dudes”—who rescued him. Portnoy said he was worried his “life was over” since he figured “Captain Dave had to be halfway to the Caribbean.” (According to the Nantucket Current, his boat never left the harbor.) He then paraphrased George Costanza: “The sea was angry, my friend. Captain Dave may never go on a boat again.”

Needless to say, Portnoy’s retelling is hilarious, and comes on the heels of another video he made last week about some problems he encountered while trying to do some home improvement work on his estate, prompting one Nantucket wag to write me that Portnoy is a better pizza critic than yachtsman. “You can take the guy out of Swampscott, but you can’t take the Swampscott out of the guy,” he wrote. “He desperately wants to become a Nantucketer, but he is a fish out of water. Writing a big check for a splashy house does not make one a native or one who knows the difference between a bow and a stern.” (Sign up here for Dry Powder.)

🔥 The Biden shitshow, cont’d, via my partner Abby Livingston: Earlier today, Adam Schiff almost single-handedly demolished any perception that Joe Biden and his allies had regained control of Hill Democrats, when the presumptive next junior senator from California called on the president to withdraw. Schiff is a consequential figure—former House Intel chairman, first-term Trump antagonist, lead 2020 impeachment manager—but it was lost on absolutely no one that the most relevant factor here was that Schiff sits at the right hand of Democratic “godmother” Nancy Pelosi. Schiff’s call for Biden’s withdrawal was the clear signal Democrats have been waiting for, the almost-incontrovertible proof that Pelosi has decided to defenestrate the president. “That’s Nancy using her drone. It’s the same as Obama using Clooney,” a senior Democratic Hill source told my partner, Tara Palmeri.

In the days since Saturday’s horrifying attempted assassination of Donald Trump, some pockets of the Democratic Party had concluded that Biden had subjugated the Hill. The drumbeat of Democrats calling for Biden to drop out quieted, at least until Schiff broke the seal on Wednesday. Every Democrat I’ve spoken with in the hours after Schiff’s announcement interpreted it as a major escalation on Pelosi’s part. And much like her quietly devastating appearance on Morning Joe last week, the former speaker can maintain a measure of plausible deniability. (Sign up for The Best & The Brightest here.)

Speaking of which…

For the MSNBC host, however, “integrity” meant being honest with the network’s very liberal and highly activated viewers about this situation—that Biden was fucked, the party was fucked, that the various options were neither easy nor good—and not pretending to live in some alternate reality where none of this was happening, “like Fox News,” as this person put it. Unfortunately, this was proving to be a challenge for some colleagues. Most hosts at the network instinctually wanted to cover the facts, this person said—the anxiety, the polls, the growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers calling for a new candidate—but they also knew that doing so would draw the ire of their most loyal viewers. “If I even cover a single poll that’s bad for Biden, I am going to get raked over the coals on Twitter,” the host said. “Viewers hate this.”

Broadly speaking, however, the majority of MSNBC hosts—Psaki, Wagner, etcetera—have offered a pretty honest account of where things stand in their party. And despite concerns over integrity, the network has handled a complex, nuanced situation with a fair amount of aplomb. For its sins, however, MSNBC has seen its recent leads over CNN evaporate, especially as the latter network rides the tide of a very newsy news cycle. For the week of July 8, which included the attempted assassination of Trump, CNN soundly beat MSNBC in the 25-to-54 demo and nearly matched it in total viewers. So far during this week’s G.O.P. convention, CNN is outperforming MSNBC on both fronts. (Fox News continues to beat both networks combined in almost any given hour).

Of course, the most mystifying chapter of MSNBC’s post-debate angst saga has been playing out on Morning Joe, where Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have sided firmly with the president and against his detractors. On the one hand, that’s unsurprising given the obvious pro-Biden bias the two have demonstrated in recent years. On the other hand, it’s quite surprising: Historically, Morning Joe has been a forum for the onetime G.O.P. congressman to chew over and yell about the day’s issues with pragmatic, mostly left-of-center Beltway veterans, set the day’s agenda, and advance more centrist wisdom about the state of play in American politics.

Nevertheless, the show continues to be a highly relevant theater in the wake of newsmaking events. Since the debate, Biden has called in to do an interview, and Nancy Pelosi used the show to carefully encourage Biden to rethink his decision to stay in the race. Most recently, though, Scarborough & Co. made news for their network’s counterintuitive and stunning decision to preempt Morning Joe on the Monday following the attempted Trump assassination. Indeed, MSNBC long ago ceded four hours of its morning, and its network identity, to Joe and Mika, who often have to vamp through slower news cycles. Why pull them from the air after such a consequential and historic moment?

A day earlier, I’m told, NBC News Group chairman Cesar Conde had determined that, in light of the seismic and sensitive nature of the Butler attack, he would preempt all of MSNBC’s perspective programming with the rolling news coverage from the NBC broadcast feed. The news division communicated the decision as a consensus that had been reached not only by Conde and MSNBC president Rashida Jones, but also Joe and Mika, themselves. This surprised some people around the show, but the operating assumption was that the special live report would be anchored by Holt and Savannah Guthrie, or something in that vein.

Instead, when the Scarborough crew turned on their televisions on Monday morning, they saw a simulcast of the morning show anchored by the younger and relatively inexperienced hosts Savannah Sellers and Joe Fryer on NBC News Now, the network’s second-tier streaming service. Once that show was over, MSNBC immediately returned to its regularly scheduled programming, leaving Joe, Mika, and Willie chafing over their singular omission from the network’s coverage of a major historical event—first privately, and then publicly the following morning when all three of them laid into their bosses for the decision. “Next time we are told there is going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs,” Scarborough said. “And the news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.”

One network source suggested to CNN that the move had been made for fear that one of the show’s guests might utter an inappropriate comment that would expose the network to criticism. The truth, however, was more mundane—obviously, whatever comments a guest might make on Monday could also be made on Tuesday—but it hinted at a more substantive management problem: Conde had been piqued by the idea of mobilizing his news platforms to cover a major news event just as CNN might, only to be reminded that the network’s real value proposition was the perspective itself. After blowback from viewers who wanted Joe and Mika, the network made the call to revert to its regularly scheduled programming, which continued Tuesday morning with the Morning Joe hosts dragging their bosses on live TV. The episode immediately called to mind MSNBC’s on-air mutiny following Conde’s ill-fated decision to hire former R.N.C. Chair Ronna McDaniel as a contributor.

Conde may be an accomplished executive trying to navigate a thorny period, but he apparently missed the business school class that explains how to level with talent before they see their subordinates sucking up their air time. Alas, no one ever said the managed decline of cable news was going to be easy—the shift from linear to digital, the balance between perspective and straight news, integrity and ratings—but this is one of those increasingly rare moments when it matters most.