The Free Press

The Democrats’ midterm strategy has finally come into focus. Their campaign speeches and investigations on the Hill make clear that they will aim to convince the public that the Trump administration is one giant grift operation, enriching top officials and their friends while the American people struggle to keep up with rising prices.

From presidential stock trades and suspicious cryptocurrency dealings to shady executive pardons and allegations of pay-to-play government contracts, Democrats believe they already have enough vivid examples to tarnish the GOP brand with independents and reclaim the House easily.

So confident are Democrats in this strategy that they are already looking past Election Day and salivating at the prospect of regaining the investigatory and subpoena power that comes with control of the House. Interviews with Democratic lawmakers and operatives reveal a minority party eager to haul Republicans before Congress to expose stories that will cripple the Trump administration and thwart the GOP’s prospects in 2028. If the first two years of Trump’s second term have been defined by an emboldened Donald Trump testing the limits of executive authority with unified GOP control of Washington, a Democratic House victory in November would make the next two years a study in how effective a minority party can be at holding the executive to account in divided government.

Democrats say that their immediate challenge is narrowing their focus so that their corruption-focused message resonates with swing voters. “There’s so much that we need to investigate, so I think it’s a matter of trying to figure out where to begin,” Rep. Wesley Bell, a member of the House Oversight Committee, told The Free Press. “This is like a coloring book where all the pictures are already colored in. We don’t have to paint anything. The administration is doing it themselves.”

As you read these lines, the single greatest event in American history has already unfolded: Candace Owens has interviewed Hunter Biden on her podcast, in an episode that will drop on Thursday. Hookers, blow, shady deals with Ukraine—there’s no telling what we’re going to learn.

All right, so perhaps the interview isn’t exactly the single greatest event in American history—the Battle of Yorktown is a slightly better fit for the title—but many of us no longer live in America. We live in the People’s Republic of Podcastistan, where Candace is queen and every new revelation is just the greatest, the wackier the better.

In case you’re new to our fantasyland, here, in no obvious order, are a few gems shared recently by our most popular podcast hosts: Charlie Kirk was a literal time traveler who predicted his own death (Owens); Joseph Stalin was a great man whose birthday we should all be celebrating (Nick Fuentes); Israel manipulated America into fighting the war in Iran (Dave Smith); officers at the highest ranks of the military are telling their soldiers that the ultimate goal of the war in Iran is to usher in the return of Jesus Christ (Joe Rogan).

I could go on. After all, these hosts frequently sit down to bounce their outlandish theories off each other. Just this Monday, we were gifted with a three-hour conversation between Dave Smith and Nick Fuentes himself.

What ought we to make of this torrent of mind-bendingly, earth-shatteringly stupid pronouncements? Ask the medium’s many critics, and you’ll hear one of two prognostications.

Barney Frank, who spent over three decades in Congress, passed away Wednesday at 86.

I marked the occasion by reviewing the book he wrote about the need for his beloved Democratic Party to moderate its positions on social and cultural issues, to help it recapture the millions of middle-class voters who have deserted it for the Republicans.

There’s a lot of straight talk in the book. Characteristically, Frank coins a witticism to describe social realities Republicans tackle but Democrats refuse to acknowledge, for fear of being labeled racist or otherwise retrograde: “notsapostas,” he called them—as in, things progressives are “not supposed to” talk about. Topping Frank’s list is the Democrats’ failure to show empathy for the victims of crime while they focus on the need for more social programs to combat its “root causes” among young black men. “Clinging to the notsaposta mindset has particularly hurt our party in the debate over how to respond to violent crime,” he argued. He urged liberals to attack poverty and racism without appearing to justify or mitigate violent criminal acts.

Earlier this month, Stanford’s Faculty Senate voted nearly unanimously to extend COLLEGE, a new general education program required of every undergraduate. Professor Iván Marinovic voted no—and then explained why in The Stanford Daily. His case is straightforward: The program buries the Western canon under a curriculum built around identity, power, and oppression. Marinovic argues that Stanford has already drifted further from classical education than its peers and that COLLEGE entrenches that drift, rather than corrects it. This may seem a small issue—what freshmen at one school are taught. But we think it gets at something bigger. We’re republishing Professor Marinovic’s essay because it asks a vital question: What should a great American university teach? — The Editors

The Stanford Faculty Senate voted last week to extend Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE), a program of three general-education courses—Why College?, Citizenship in the 21st Century, and a Global Perspectives menu—that all undergraduates take in their first year. The vote was nearly unanimous. I voted no.

I did not take the vote lightly. Many colleagues have worked on this program for years, and I acknowledge these efforts. But I cannot support a program I believe will be detrimental to the education we offer our students.

My objection is not to general ed requirements. The humanities are indispensable to an undergraduate education, and a Stanford degree is incomplete without some exposure to the best of them.

Have you ever tasted a homemade cookie, or a slice of cake, and told the person who made it, “This is so good, you could sell it”? Today, many Americans are taking the compliment seriously. And they’re making a killing.

Gabby Golden lives in Dyersville, Iowa (population: 4,500). Her career as a home baker started in 2023, when she made a few loaves of sourdough bread for a church fundraiser, which sold out immediately.

“My husband was like, ‘Babe, you should make bread and sell it,’ ” she said.

Golden’s husband is a pastor, and at the time their family of six was reliant on his income. To help out, Golden said, “I was planning to go to nursing school.” But she thought baking might be a way to make extra grocery money in the meantime.

Soon, she was at a local farmers market hawking sandwich bread and jalapeño cheddar loaves every week. But managing her four kids while manning her booth was chaotic, and she found herself wondering: Could she sell her bread from the covered porch of her 1,300-square-foot home instead?

She started doing just that in January of 2024. “I set it up really cute, and then I started advertising,” she said. “Word of mouth in a small town travels like wildfire.”

These days, Golden sells about 60 loaves of bread a week, and between 600 and a thousand cookies, plus dozens of scones. Six months ago, she upgraded to a 20-quart industrial mixer to accommodate larger volumes of dough. Golden Goods, as she called her at-home bakery, hasn’t just subsidized the weekly grocery shop, she said; it has paid for a trip to Disneyland, plus two couple’s cruises to the Bahamas, and “multiple car repairs” that added up to around $7,000. All in all, Golden said she brings in approximately the same as an elementary school teacher would in her area. Except, she gets to work from home, and for herself.

“I feel like God handed me the home bakery and said, ‘Here, this is going to be your extra-income source. This is gonna help you stay home with your kids. This is gonna be a blessing to your family and your community.’ ”

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan looks at how John Adams paved the way for independence in the Continental Congress. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

Even a man of George Washington’s stature couldn’t escape one of the more annoying features of modern life: meetings. Worried as he was to leave his army in New York City amid reports of thousands of British reinforcements, including German troops, on the move (see our earlier newsletter), the general couldn’t turn down an “invitation” 250 years ago this week from the Continental Congress to confer in Philadelphia.

It didn’t take many visits to the brick state house where Congress convened in the City of Brotherly Love for Washington to complain about delegates “still feeding themselves upon the dainty food of reconciliation” and moving too slowly toward a declaration of independence from Great Britain. As it turned out, events were moving faster than Washington perceived, thanks in large measure to a series of maneuvers orchestrated by Massachusetts delegate John Adams.

The plan had come together the previous week when Adams and his allies in Congress introduced a resolution advising all 13 colonies to put in place governments “sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs.” Seemingly harmless, the measure passed the chamber easily on May 10, 1776. Only then did Adams come forward with a proposal for adding a preamble that revealed what he really intended the resolution to accomplish. The text included this line: “It is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed, and all the powers of government exerted under the authority of the people of the colonies.” When affixed to the resolution, it was a call for all the colonies to eradicate every last vestige of loyalty to George III and set up governments deriving their power from the people alone.

It’s Wednesday, May 20. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Jed Rubenfeld on the president’s IRS self-dealing, and why a court might not be able to stop him. Joe Nocera has a new podcast about the crime that gripped America like no other. Olivia Reingold on the Luigi Mangione fangirls who have NYC press credentials. Plus: a literary controversy for our time. And much more.

But first: One party, under Trump, indivisible.

The biggest primaries on Tuesday took place in Georgia and Kentucky, and on the Republican side, President Donald Trump triumphed in every single one.

Some victories were subtle. In the Kentucky Senate primary, Rep. Andy Barr defeated Daniel Cameron—a one-time protégé of Senator Mitch McConnell, who has become one of Trump’s staunchest critics within the GOP.

In Georgia, the top two finishers who qualified for the runoff in the governor’s race are a pair of MAGA Republicans, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones and businessman Rick Jackson. Far behind in the vote tally was Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who challenged Trump’s voter-fraud claims after the 2020 election.

Trump’s biggest victory came in the headliner race of the night, between Rep. Thomas Massie and Trump’s handpicked challenger, Ed Gallrein. Massie broke with the president in an explosive way over the past year, tying him to the Epstein files, voting to halt the war in Iran, and accusing him of being an Israeli stooge.

Massie lost by about 10 points Tuesday night, but as Seth Mandel notes, his movement may live on. There is a rising faction on the right that abhors foreign wars and believes Israeli conspiracies control U.S. policy. For now, GOP voters prefer Trump to that faction by a long shot. But who will fill the vacuum once the president is gone?

—Mene Ukueberuwa

On the night of March 1, 1932, someone climbed a ladder to a window of a remote New Jersey estate and stole the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, the famed American aviator. The baby was later found dead, and a man was arrested, tried, and executed—case closed. Or was it? Ninety-four years later, many of the details still don’t add up. Free Press journalists Joe Nocera and Poppy Damon became obsessed with getting to the bottom of it—and we think you will too. Listen to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a new podcast from The Free Press hosted by Joe Nocera.

Listen to episode one below, and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

• Thirty-year Treasury yields have hit their highest level in 19 years amid persistent inflation fears related to the Iran war. The rising rates are pushing up the costs of borrowing for homeowners and businesses.

• Maureen Galindo, a candidate in the Democratic primary runoff for a Texas House seat, said in an Instagram post that she would turn an ICE detention center “into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.” She added: “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.” Texas Democrats have denounced Galindo’s comments.

• Google is changing its search box for the first time in 30 years. In place of the skinny rectangle will be a larger box to encourage longer questions for Gemini, Google’s AI. Users will see more AI answers in their results and fewer links to sites.

• The Long Island Rail Road strike ended after unions representing its workers reached a deal with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Monday. The deal includes a 4.5 percent salary increase and “delivers raises for workers while protecting riders and taxpayers,” Governor Kathy Hochul said.

• The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals seemed to suggest it didn’t have the authority to review the Pentagon’s decision to designate Anthropic as a national security risk, but it could review specific orders banning the government from using certain companies’ products. The hearing comes after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated the AI company a supply chain risk after Anthropic refused to remove contractual restrictions on use of its software for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

• President Trump endorsed Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in his primary challenge to Senator John Cornyn yesterday. “John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The two candidates will face off in a runoff next week, and early voting has already begun.

• President Trump said he “was an hour away” from resuming bombing Iran yesterday, but Iranian leaders were eager to make a deal. The head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee said Trump’s hesitation was because he knew “any move against Iran means facing a decisive military response.”

On Monday morning, two teenagers opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego. Three people were murdered, among them a security guard and father of eight. Hours later, the suspects—ages 17 and 18—were found dead from apparent self-inflicted gunshot wounds a few blocks away.

Im ye’hareg b’mikdash adonai, cohen ve’navi. Shall a priest and prophet be murdered in the sacred space of G-d?! (Lam. 2:20)

Sacrilege. Desecration. Abomination. These are the words beneath the tears and disbelief that I felt. The news from San Diego is, unfortunately, very familiar. I serve as the founder and senior rabbi of Romemu, a pluralistic post-denominational Jewish congregation in New York City. In the course of my rabbinate, there have been countless moments like this one, mourning lives lost to violent bigotry and hate.

The Jewish tradition is in awe of human life; no earthly phenomenon is more precious or more reflective of divine majesty. Every life is a universe. Every human being is B’tzelem Elohim, created in the image of God. The great Rabbi Yitz Greenberg understands this to mean that all people are endowed with three inalienable dignities: infinite value, equality, and uniqueness. Human life is infinitely worthy, and thus the violence that occurred on Monday morning is a desecration that defies description. Language is insufficient. The actions of these two young men, rooted in ideologies of hate, can never be excused or justified. Full stop.

And our willingness to say so cannot falter or fail based on our politics or our differences with the victims.

GOP Rep. Thomas Massie lost to challenger Ed Gallrein on Tuesday in one of the most expensive primary contests in history, and it wasn’t especially close. Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL, beat the incumbent by a vote of about 55 percent to 45 percent.

Yet by his telling, Massie’s real opponents were something much bigger. At a fundamental level, the irascible Kentucky libertarian pitted himself against President Donald Trump as well as a collection of forces, real and imagined, that Massie believes are steering Trump’s presidency: the “Zionists,” the “military-industrial complex,” AIPAC, and the “Epstein class.” His defeat is a vindication of Trump’s power, and also a victory for moral hygiene within the GOP. He confirmed as much in his concession speech Tuesday with a joke aimed at Israel: “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

As recently as 2024, Massie would have seemed an odd standard-bearer for what’s now known as the “America First” wing of the right: a cohort of politicians like former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, media figures such as Tucker Carlson, and an unknown number of voters, all of whom have broken with Trump over his alliance with Israel and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Before he became a populist conspiracist, Massie was a libertarian from central casting. He was first elected to represent Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District in 2012, when the enthusiasm of the Tea Party movement still lingered.

The $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” just announced by the Department of Justice may not be 100 percent illegal, but it’s still a gross embarrassment that the Trump administration should rescind.

Here’s what we know so far. Back in January, President Donald Trump, along with his eldest sons and the Trump Organization, sued the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $10 billion over their tax returns leaking between 2018 and 2020. That suit was tricky, to put it mildly, because Trump is now essentially in charge of the IRS, and it’s a long-settled maxim of the law that a man “cannot sue himself.” After all, what would prevent President Trump, as the defendant, from agreeing to pay $10 billion of taxpayer money to Trump the plaintiff, even if the lawsuit had no legal merit?

The presiding judge in the case called for a hearing on this issue, suggesting she might have to dismiss the case because of it. But this past Monday, possibly to avoid that hearing, the “parties” to the case announced a “settlement” in which Trump and the other plaintiffs agreed to drop their claims and, in exchange, the Justice Department—of which Trump is also essentially in charge—agreed to create an “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

This fund, according to the published settlement agreement, will compensate people who were victims of “lawfare” and “weaponization,” which are defined as the “use of the levers of government power by Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents to target individuals, groups, and entities for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.”