Welcome to Washington Secrets, your guide to who’s up and who is less up. Today, we take a look at Will Lewis’s two years at the Washington Post and rate the chances of a full funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security — spoiler: 1% if you are lucky. Plus there’s more from the three-way Republican car-wreck in Texas. Is it only Tuesday?
The fallout from the Washington Post evisceration continues.
Conservatives are lining up to blame the journalists themselves for writing liberal pablum that no one wanted to read, supporters of the paper blame a billionaire owner who got tired of his plaything, and the paper’s remaining executives have had to deny that they fired correspondents in war zones without offering them help to get home.
One thing everyone seems to agree on is that Will Lewis, dumped as publisher over the weekend, was responsible for the whole sorry mess.
Lewis was appointed in the fall of 2023. His reputation as a British journalist, who was raised in the hard-charging world of Fleet Street newspapers and had first prospered at the Telegraph, where his team broke the stellar story of MPs’ greedy expenses claims, and later under Rupert Murdoch, made him suspect as far as the genteel newsroom of the Washington Post was concerned.
But he was exactly the sort of editor that Bezos wanted as he tried to work out how to update a business model largely unchanged in a century.
A story that has done the rounds among journalists who worked for Lewis back in the day illustrates his role perfectly.
Back when he was editor of the Telegraph, more than 15 years ago, Secrets is told, he did a tour of the paper’s foreign bureaus.
In the U.S., he outlined his vision for covering one of the biggest, most diverse nations on the planet. What we should do, he mused to a correspondent, is have a reporter in every town and city that has a Walmart.
The reporter did not know quite what to make of it. There were more than 4,000 Walmarts in the U.S. Was Lewis bonkers, in the parlance of British newspaper headlines? Was he suggesting the Telegraph was about to appoint a network of thousands to monitor parking lots and sales of bananas?
On the other hand, maybe it was a genius idea. In 2015, those reporters in small-town America would have charted the rise of Donald Trump and the emergence of a new breed of voter long before the rest of the media establishment in New York and Washington caught up.
It was even a nod to the sort of hyperlocal news that has proliferated with the death of more conventional local newspapers in the past few years.
So you can see why Bezos hired him. It is exactly the sort of norm-busting, blue-sky thinking that would appeal to an audience at, say, the World Economic Forum in Davos, or a billionaire who made his fortune by upending the retail industry and now wants to remake the news industry with a new model, while running a space business on the side.
Lewis’s brand of disruptive thinking may go over well with the world’s new breed of philosopher-salesmen, high on their own intellect, but less so in the newsroom.
As Tina Brown, a fellow Brit, points out in her latest must-read Substack column, journalists never got to grips with his lofty PowerPoint presentations, which famously included a confusing bow-tie graphic designed to show a strategy for growth.
“To this day, I don’t understand it,” former star Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins told her. “Some people were like, ‘Is that a bow tie? Is that a funnel?’”
It is a common response to an executive with a reputation for arriving with big ideas and leaving soon after.
And then there was the “third newsroom.” If the first newsroom was the, erm, newsroom, and the second newsroom was the opinion section, then the third newsroom was Lewis’s big innovation. A supposed pivot to a more commercial operation.
“Something needed to change,” a former Washington Post staffer who doesn’t want to reveal their name while looking for a new job. “The problem was that no one really understood what the changes were.”
Don’t hold your breath on a full Homeland Security deal
Republicans and Democrats appear no closer to agreeing on a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security beyond Saturday, when a partial government shutdown would kick in.
Republicans are chafing at Democratic demands to rein in immigration enforcement, such as a requirement for judicial warrants and better identification of DHS officers, and have responded with requests of their own, including legislation to require proof of citizenship before Americans register to vote and action on “sanctuary cities.”
The good news is that the two sides are trading papers and proposals. Democrats are even negotiating directly with White House.
The bad news is that, on Monday night, Democratic leaders rejected a proposal from the White House as “incomplete and insufficient.”
A source close to negotiations told Secrets that the only likely outcome is a continuing resolution — a short-term funding deal that puts aside the bigger questions and kicks the can down the road. Anything bigger would require Democratic negotiators to put aside the demands of their energetic base to “defund” Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“A full year funding deal I give a 0% probability,” they said. “Maybe 1%.”
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Someone can’t sleep
Trump stayed behind the scenes on Monday, with no public events. The same is expected, but that could change, Tuesday. No wonder he had so much energy in the middle of the night.
He shared a barrage of messages on his Truth Social platform soon after 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, including revisiting old grievances about the Obama administration. He posted a poll detailing his “highest approval rating” among Hispanic voters from May of last year and sharing praise from Robert F. Kennedy’s son for his work to reduce drug prices.
There was also a trip down memory lane with recollections from the 1980s. He posted a photograph of himself shaking hands with Ronald Reagan when he was president in 1987, and an interview from around the same time.
And that was all hours after he used the platform to threaten Canada that he would block the opening of a new bridge between the two countries.
Texas watch
Secrets makes no apologies for its obsession with the GOP firestorm in Texas masquerading as a Senate primary. Supporters of Ken Paxton, the fiery attorney general, are convinced he will eventually win Trump’s endorsement. Although Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) backers are equally convinced he will land it. Meanwhile, Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) seems to be the one with the most momentum. Secrets detailed the madness on Monday.
Early voting in the primary starts next week. And you can expect the mud flinging to only intensify.
Anyway, good news for Paxton. Yesterday, he won the endorsement of Turning Point USA, which comes with plenty of on-the-ground support.
My colleague Brady Knox has the details here.
Lunchtime reading
Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement isn’t clearing the field in GOP primaries: Trump has been the kingmaker extraordinaire in recent years. His endorsement, or lack thereof, has made and destroyed political careers. My colleague Mabinty Quarshie reports that things are not so straightforward this year.
Gabbard’s 2020 election claims put her back in favor with Trump: How do you avoid falling out with Trump or rescue yourself from a precarious position? Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, who looked not long ago to have been frozen out, offers a useful example.
