The once-prestigious news blog is located many, many floor below the Washington Free Beacon
Politico‘s flagship newsletter will no longer be authored by a British journalist who had to look up Franklin D. Roosevelt on Wikipedia. Jack Blanchard has finally been replaced as Playbook managing editor and lead author, the Virginia-based news blog announced Sunday.
Blanchard took over the once-prestigious franchise days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration in 2025. He got off to a rocky start, frequently making news for the wrong reasons. Blanchard botched Chuck Schumer’s title, misspelled Billy Ray Cyrus’s name, and referred to the field at the Super Bowl as a “pitch.”
Those were minor flubs compared with the time Blanchard forgot about FDR while arguing that Trump’s “impactful start” to his second term was without precedent in U.S. history. He followed up by conceding his critics “may have a point” and quoted a passage from FDR’s Wikipedia entry.
Weeks later, Blanchard reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was “out of the country” while traveling from Hawaii (a U.S. state) to Guam (a U.S. territory). American journalists piled on. “There’s a consistent pattern of colossal mistakes, and (even worse) poor analysis,” Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp wrote of Blanchard’s performance in March 2025.
Blanchard and the Playbook newsletter gradually faded into irrelevance. In April, Politico‘s leadership started to draw up a succession plan after acknowledging that the Brit’s tenure “hasn’t worked out” for a “variety of reasons.”
The news blog announced Playbook‘s “next chapter” in a statement on Sunday. It did not acknowledge Blanchard’s departure from the franchise but noted his new role as Politico‘s global politics bureau chief, where his familiarity with less important countries may prove more relevant.
Politico tapped three reporters already on staff to cowrite the Playbook newsletter. Adam Wren, Dasha Burns, and Will Steakin are American citizens with elite credentials. They graduated from Northwestern, UC Berkeley, and Columbia, respectively. Politico heralded the transition with flattering bios of the new coauthors along with brief interviews.
Wren has spent his career “decoding how power works in American politics,” the news blog reported. Just don’t ask him about his favorite scoop. “This is like asking me about my favorite breath,” he told Politico. “The next one keeps me alive.” If he had to pick, Wren said he was particularly fond of his 2023 article on James Talarico, which helped the Texas state lawmaker raise his national profile before running for U.S. Senate. “He’s Deeply Religious and a Democrat,” the headline read. “He Might Be the Next Big Thing in Texas Politics.”
Burns, who is “known for her deep sourcing,” said her dream interview would be a “high stakes” chat with “complicated figures” such as Vladimir Putin. She recently interviewed Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, for 40 minutes but was unable to push the terrorist-adjacent candidate off his talking points. Burns found this quite impressive. “I know you haven’t run for Senate before, but you are relentless in your messaging,” she told El-Sayed. “It’s fascinating to watch how you … how you’ve been able to operate.”
Steakin, who studied politics at Columbia, fondly recalled interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during her long-shot primary campaign in 2018. He said he would love to sit down with Tucker Carlson, whom he described (without evidence) as building one of the “most influential” platforms on the right.
Last week, Steakin coauthored a report on Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, the wunderkind operatives who failed to vet Graham Platner after recruiting him to run for U.S. Senate in Maine. The story revealed that Platner’s campaign knew that the candidate did not buy his house with a loan from the Department of Veterans Affairs—a false claim that appeared in a now-infamous New Yorker profile published last September—but let it slide. (Platner’s father loaned him the money.)
“The New Yorker corrected the story months later, after the mortgage records surfaced publicly,” Steakin and coauthor Chris Sommerfeldt wrote.
That’s technically true. The New Yorker‘s vaunted fact-checking department eventually admitted its mistake after the mortgage records “surfaced publicly” in a report published by the Washington Free Beacon, a pro-freedom website located dozens of floors above the Politico headquarters.
In any event, the Free Beacon is excited for the next chapter of the Playbook newsletter. The quality has inarguably gone downhill since Eugene Daniels left Politico for MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) in 2025. The self-described “walking Beyoncé encyclopedia” and Beltway fashion icon was best known for his work on behalf of former vice president Kamala Harris. Daniels signed off with an impressive scoop, reporting last March that Harris was getting “serious about considering” a run for governor of California. (She wrote a memoir instead.)
Other notable Playbook alumni include Ryan Lizza. A former CNN analyst who was fired from the New Yorker for “improper sexual conduct,” Lizza is best known for launching his Substack site by revealing that his ex-fiancée, disgraced journalist Olivia Nuzzi, cheated on him with former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.
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