The Free Press

Spencer Pratt, one of the greatest reality-TV villains of the 2000s, and a current candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral race, just delivered what may be one of the most effective, viral political ads in decades.

Here’s a brief synopsis: Bathed in ethereal California light, Pratt, 42, stands outside the mansions of incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember (and mayoral candidate) Nithya Raman. They, he tells viewers, do not have to deal with the consequences of their bad policies. Cue the consequences, flashing across the screen: homeless encampments, buildings on fire, a masked man holding a flare in front of a graffitied wall.

“This is where I live,” Pratt says, as the ad cuts to an Airstream trailer on the scorched lot where his Pacific Palisades property used to be. He’s been living there for most of the time since his house burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires. The response to the fires by Bass’s administration has been widely maligned.

“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the ad. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor.” The camera pans back to reveal his empty lot surrounded by some trees, the sun in the sky, and the campaign’s slogan: “A New Golden Age for Los Angeles.”

What sets America apart from its peers? One answer is the “animal spirits” of American business, which have produced generations of prosperity at home and helped uplift the poor across the world. At our best, Americans seek to harness the power of capitalism, rather than denounce and suppress it.

There was a time when Americans celebrated great industrialists—when Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie were household names spoken with pride, rather than contempt. Today, the conventional wisdom in mainstream media outlets and storied educational institutions is that capitalism is evil—and that violence may even be justified to thwart it.

In our morally inverted world, it’s worth remembering that, for all its imperfections, American capitalism is worthy of celebration. So this week, as part of America at 250—our yearlong celebration of this country’s milestone birthday—we’re celebrating America’s great capitalists, from Ford and Carnegie to Taylor Swift: how they made their fortunes, how they spent them, and the legacies they leave behind.

As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, the great entrepreneurs of our time produce things that live in servers and on the cloud—inventions that may leave little physical trace hundreds of years from now. But, in our first offering, Philip Delves Broughton takes us on a different journey: into the Walmart Supercenters you can shop in, the golden arches you can enjoy a burger under, the factories humming across America. He’s celebrating the titans who changed our physical world: the Builders.

If the Builders mold the physical world, consider the woman whose very presence boosts revenue at every business in every town where she performs—the first major pop star to own all of her own copyrights, and the undisputed ruler of the sonic world: Taylor Swift. “Swift is a titan of industry,” writes Dominic Green, “one of the great American capitalists that Ralph Waldo Emerson called ‘monomaniacs’—the creative spirits whose ‘speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain of the world.’” Read his essay on how Swift made it in the business of sound, right before the hostile takeover by the business of images.

After making all their money, America’s great capitalists are faced with the question of how to spend it—and how much of it to give away. That can be a trickier dilemma than you might think. Mark Gimein traces the arc of American philanthropy from Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Gospel of Wealth” to the Giving Pledge, launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, and asks why today’s billionaires are walking away from the tradition that made their predecessors immortal.

—The Editors

Dear Abigail,

My 7-year-old daughter has a good group of first-grade friends at our local public school. I am casually friendly with most of their moms. This week, my daughter reported to us, while giggling uncomfortably, that one of the little boys in her friend group told her he doesn’t like Jewish people. We are Jewish. But so far, she’s been okay.

I know this boy’s mother—I see her regularly at various school events, and he has been to our house. My friends have told me to call her, and to give her the benefit of the doubt. My friends point out their own sons have made offensive remarks that didn’t originate from their families. My own 5-year-old son said something offensive about another race recently, and got multiple talking-tos, to correct this belief. (He said Mexican people had bad breath, based on a person he knows.) Another friend pointed out her son wrote the N-word, and she was completely mortified.

But somehow a boy saying “I don’t like Jewish people” feels different, and thus I am disinclined to give the family the benefit of the doubt. My inclination is to do nothing, and let my daughter decide if she wants to be friends with this boy. What do you think?

—Rachel, 39

Rachel,

It is a truth rarely acknowledged that the most tiresome aspect of parenting is the advice showered on you by other moms. Newbies to the job themselves, they nonetheless issue proclamations with the confidence of Caesar. But in this instance, neither you nor your friends are seeing things clearly.

Rachel, the boy who says he “doesn’t like Jewish people”—he’s 7.

Based on the stray comment of a boy who just learned to tie his shoes, you’ve invited his entire family to set up residence inside your head.

It’s Thursday, April 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Caitlin Flanagan’s inaugural piece for The Free Press. A Supreme Court ruling that could flip 30 House seats. Eli Lake on the star professor of the Iran war. And much more.

But first: Yet another attack on Jews in the UK.

Yesterday, we woke up to the news of yet another attack on Jews in the UK. On Wednesday morning in London, an alleged Islamist terrorist with a knife went hunting for Jews on a street in broad daylight. He stabbed two Jewish men before being tased and arrested by police.

It’s the latest in a disturbing string of attacks on British Jews. The growing threat to Jewish life in Britain is something I’ve experienced firsthand and have written about in these pages. It keeps getting worse. And Britain’s political leaders have offered little more than platitudes.

Britain’s Jews are losing patience with these hollow condemnations. One of them is Alex Hearn. Alex is a lifelong Labour Party campaigner who helped oust the party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, who was found by an independent investigation to have been responsible for “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” against Jews. When Keir Starmer took over as party leader, and then became prime minister, Hearn was optimistic. Not anymore. Today he says he has lost faith in Starmer—who has time and again failed to rise to the challenge of Jew-hate in the UK. Read Hearn’s essay to understand what is happening to Britain’s Jews—and how they have been let down by the country’s leaders.

—Josh Kaplan

The Free Press has a new columnist: Caitlin Flanagan! We couldn’t be more excited that Caitlin is now officially part of our band. She is, as Nellie Bowles put it in her introduction to Caitlin’s first column for us, “sharp, smart, lyrical, honest, poignant, and funny, surprising and contrarian in her thinking but not just to be contrarian for its own sake, and she’s equal parts kind and ruthless. Deeply Californian and deeply American (two different things), she’s everything you want in a writer.”

Her first column is on rising political violence—and the parallels between today and the era of political assassination in which Caitlin grew up. Caitlin will usually be behind a paywall, but her inaugural piece is free for everyone to read—as a special treat. Don’t miss it:

• Prosecutors revealed Cole Allen took a selfie in his hotel room 30 minutes before attempting to assassinate Trump at the WHCA dinner, showing him armed with a shotgun, pistol, knives, daggers, and ammunition. They’re seeking detention without bond, calling it “a planned attack of unfathomable malice.”

• Elon Musk continued his testimony in an Oakland, California, court case that could determine the future of OpenAI. Musk is arguing that OpenAI should have remained a nonprofit. Sparring with an OpenAI lawyer who questioned his credibility and played up his connections to President Trump, Musk said that he “was a fool” to have provided OpenAI with early funding.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denied the Iran war is a “quagmire” and called congressional critics the “biggest adversary,” while requesting a $1.5 trillion military budget as war costs hit an estimated $25 billion. Democrats grilled him on diplomatic isolation, civilian casualties, and whether Iran’s nuclear threat has actually been neutralized.

• Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell said he plans to stay on the board of the central bank when his term ends. The Justice Department dropped an often-criticized criminal investigation of Powell, clearing the way for the impending confirmation of successor Kevin Warsh. But Powell said he felt he had no choice but to stay until a probe into his management of the Federal Reserve was “well and truly over.”

• Cheap Chinese cars are flooding into El Paso from Mexico, where they’re legally sold, with models starting around $10,000 versus the $51,000 U.S. average. Lawmakers are split—some cite national security risks from Chinese vehicle software, while Trump has signaled openness to letting Chinese automakers build plants in the U.S.

• Two-thirds of babies under age two use screens despite government-issued guidance stating they have none at all, with some exposed up to eight hours daily. Researchers call for tech companies to fix misleading “suitable for all ages” content ratings, saying the burden shouldn’t fall on parents alone.

• A United Airlines pilot reported that his plane may have hit a drone—described as “red” and “shiny”—at about 3,000 feet while approaching San Diego airport. The Boeing 737 landed safely with 54 people on board, and inspectors found no damage.

For tickets to our live recording with Jon Meacham in Philadelphia, click here and register. Use code TFP for a 20 percent discount.

In this episode, Shilo sits down with sportswriter Wright Thompson to explore what the ESPN mainstay has learned from decades of covering elite athletes such as Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan. Does greatness require rage, d…

In a blockbuster ruling, the Supreme Court just struck down a Louisiana redistricting map because the state legislature, attempting to comply with the Voting Rights Act, had deliberately created a “majority-minority” district—a district where blacks were a majority. There are many majority-minority congressional districts in other states, similarly drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act, all of which may now be unconstitutional under the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. Because those districts tend to elect Democrats, some have predicted that the outcome the Court just reached in Callais could upend the midterms, turning between 12 and 20 blue House seats red.

Such dramatic consequences are very unlikely, as I’ll explain in a moment. But first—what happened in Callais, and what did the Court hold?

The background of the case is tortuous. In 2022, Louisiana’s Republican-dominated legislature drew a redistricting map that created five safe Republican congressional seats and one safe Democratic seat. Black voters were the majority in the safe Democratic district.

That map was challenged in federal court. The plaintiffs argued that under the Voting Rights Act, the state should have a second majority-black district because blacks make up about 32 percent of Louisiana’s population, whereas one out of six districts amounts to only 16 percent.

The plaintiffs won, and the federal court ordered Louisiana to redraw its map to create a second majority-black district.

Louisiana complied, but then was sued again—in a different case, in a different federal court, this time by plaintiffs representing white and other non-black voters. These plaintiffs argued that deliberately creating a second black-majority district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Equal Protection Clause, violating the rights of non-black voters. And if the Voting Rights Act mandated that result, the plaintiffs argued, then the Voting Rights Act itself was unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs in this new case also won, which directly contradicted the outcome of the first case. In other words, in 2022 a federal court ordered Louisiana to create a new majority-black district on statutory grounds, but in 2024 a second federal court ordered the state to undo that district on constitutional grounds. That second holding went to the Supreme Court, and this week the Court, by a 6–3 vote, affirmed, concluding that purposefully creating a majority-black district was indeed unconstitutional.

More than that, the Court—in a lengthy opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito—strongly suggested that nearly all deliberately created majority-minority districts are likely unconstitutional. Dividing up citizens by race, said the Court, is “odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” And “where the State assumes from a group of voters’ race that they ‘think alike, share the same political interests, and will prefer the same candidates at the polls,’ it engages in racial stereotyping at odds with equal protection mandates.”

The Supreme Court ruling in Callais leaves open a possible exception for cases where the evidence strongly suggests that a redistricting map deliberately discriminates against minority voters. What about the fact that black voters are 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but got only one of six districts in the state’s original map? Doesn’t that show purposeful discrimination?

No, according to the new ruling—not if it was simply the result of partisan redistricting. If the state’s Republican-dominated legislature was just trying to cram as many Democratic voters as they could into a single district—while spreading out the rest harmlessly in safe Republican districts—that’s a partisan gerrymander, not a racial gerrymander. And partisan gerrymanders, said the Court, are perfectly constitutional. As long as state legislators pursue purely partisan objectives or other constitutionally permissible goals, and do not prejudice minority voters on account of their race, their map will get the green light.

The Callais dissenters were harshly critical, accusing the majority of distorting the Constitution and gutting the Voting Rights Act. As she often does, Justice Elena Kagan—who wrote the dissent—came up with a powerful hypothetical. Imagine, she wrote, that due to a history of racial discrimination, almost all of a state’s blacks live in one city, while almost all of the state’s white voters live outside that city. Imagine further that most blacks vote Democrat, whereas most whites vote Republican. Under traditional districting schemes, that city would get to be its own district, and blacks would be able to elect a congressman of their choice.

Callais’ implications for the midterms will probably not be as dramatic as some have predicted.

But instead, a Republican-dominated legislature draws a map that breaks that city into six little pieces and assigns each of those pieces to one of six outlying districts, drawn in such a way as to create six safe Republican seats. The result is that blacks are not a majority in any district and can’t elect the candidate of their choice. In that scenario, Kagan argues, blacks’ votes are “wasted”; they “matter less” than white votes. Yet under the Court’s new Callais opinion, Kagan concludes, that would be a mere political gerrymander, violating neither the Voting Rights Act nor the Constitution.

I think Kagan is correct in this conclusion: The Callais majority’s decision would indeed allow a state legislature to break up a racial bloc of voters so long as the legislature did so for purely partisan reasons. To the conservative majority, that’s no more an act of racial discrimination than it would be for a college to use only SAT scores to admit applicants. If fewer applicants from certain minority groups happen to be admitted as a result, that’s disparate impact, not racial discrimination.

I predicted the outcome of Callais in these pages six months ago, precisely because of the Court’s 2023 decision prohibiting affirmative action in university admissions. To the conservative justices, using race to benefit black voters is essentially another form of affirmative action. For Justice Kagan, along with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, deliberately dividing up voters by race and drawing majority-minority districts is critical in some contexts to overcoming this country’s history of racial discrimination. But to the conservatives, doing that is itself racial discrimination.

Callais’ implications for the midterms will probably not be as dramatic as some have predicted. While Republicans are likely to pick up an additional seat in Louisiana, the Court’s decision comes almost certainly too late to spur a wave of judicial decisions finding other majority-minority districts unconstitutional. Cases alleging racial gerrymanders take time, and federal courts are not allowed to interfere in state electoral rules too close to an election. So while Callais is of great importance, its immediate impact will probably be limited.

But I’ll conclude with one point against the Callais dissenters, and one point in their favor.

Here’s the point against. The liberal position on affirmative action and other uses of race to benefit minorities would be much stronger if the left, over the last couple of decades, had not steered the ideology and practices of affirmative action in so palpable an anti-Asian and anti-white direction. What the left called “anti-racism” became racist, and everyone with eyes could see it. What the left called “inclusion” became exclusion.

By overplaying its hand on affirmative action, and by engaging in doublespeak while pushing “anti-racism” and “diversity,” the left made a huge tactical mistake, undermining its own credibility and empowering the conservative backlash. When, today, Democratic opponents of Louisiana’s partisan gerrymandering call it racist, they are not going to be taken seriously. And they shouldn’t be: They are simply playing a race card to conceal their own partisan objectives.

Now here’s the point in the dissent’s favor. The Callais dissenters vigorously decry the Court’s 2019 Rucho case, which held that partisan gerrymanders are constitutional. I agree with them. The sorry and democracy-eroding effects of that decision are now playing out all over the country.

Partisan redistricting can lock in control of a political party even if that party does not represent the majority. In Louisiana, for example, registered Democrats actually outnumber Republicans by about 37 percent to 35 percent (the rest are independent or belong to other parties). But if, in a given year, Republicans happen to get control of the statehouse, they can in theory draw redistricting maps that lock in their party’s legislative control, and assure it disproportionate congressional representation, for decades. The same, of course, goes for Democrats—as recent developments in Virginia may illustrate.

That’s not democracy, and it shouldn’t be constitutional.

This morning, a man holding a knife ran down the street of a Jewish part of north London, hunting for Jews. He stabbed two of them. The suspect was tased after he tried to stab the officers who stopped him. Police have declared it a terrorist incident. The two victims, thankfully, are in stable condition.

Within hours of the stabbing, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the attack “deeply concerning.” He said we must be “absolutely clear in our determination to deal with any of these offenses.” I have been a Labour Party supporter for decades and I have to say plainly: The prime minister’s platitudes are not enough. They have not been enough for some time.

This is the latest in a huge surge of antisemitic attacks in London in recent months. Only last week, a viral video circulated of an Orthodox Jewish man harassed in the street and called a baby killer. Weeks before, ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity were set on fire. Each time, the prime minister says “Antisemitism has no place in the UK,” or some similar platitude.

Two days after U.S. special forces rescued an American pilot from Iran, an AI-generated Lego film recreating the entire mission was already racking up millions of views on X. Filmmaker Charlie Curran made it in 30 minutes. Pirate Wires’ Ryan Hassan sat down with him to talk about how he’s building a full AI film studio in LA, why the Marvelfication of Hollywood was always going to crack the system open, and what comes next. We’re republishing it in our pages today, but for some of the sharpest writing on all things tech, be sure to follow the work of our colleagues over at Pirate Wires.

Two days after U.S. special forces rescued an American soldier from the depths of the Iranian mountains, an AI-generated film went viral on X. At just over a minute long, it recreates the entire saga of DUDE-44 (the call sign of the fallen jet). . . with Lego soldiers, fighter jet explosions, and a (again, Lego) POTUS feature. Bricky helicopters fly through Iranian mountains while soldiers on the ground try to survive plastic shoot-outs.

Title: Rescuing American Pilot in Iran (2026, colorized)

The post exploded (sorry), collecting millions of views.

“Hollywood will not be able to keep up with this,” one viewer wrote. “It just happen [sic] 2 days ago and there’s already a short movie.”

“We deserve a full length feature!!” someone else replied.

“I don’t care what your political stance is, God Bless Our Troops and God Bless America,” said one patriot.

This instant classic is the work of Charlie Curran, a filmmaker testing the limits of the form with the help of AI. He started posting short films on X in January and has made a name for himself since then, generating tens of millions of views (and $27K from X payouts in just 2 weeks). He’s even drawn attention from Elon Musk. . . in response to an AI-generated horror film he created titled Titty Killer 5.

It is my great honor to announce that Caitlin Flanagan is joining The Free Press. Finally.

Caitlin, a great American writer, until recently at The Atlantic magazine, has been a mentor and friend since before this whole thing was a glimmer in our eyes. During long days at her house in Pasadena, we hammered out the details of The Free Press. We complained; we brainstormed; we rehearsed hard conversations. Her husband Rob coached Bari in how to, you know, be a boss. Which is all to say, we adore Caitlin Flanagan. And now, finally, we get Caitlin Flanagan as a writer. And what is she like as a writer?

She’s sharp, smart, lyrical, honest, poignant, and funny, surprising and contrarian in her thinking but not just to be contrarian for its own sake, and she’s equal parts kind and ruthless. Deeply Californian and deeply American (two different things), she’s everything you want in a writer. For a sense, read Caitlin Flanagan on the abortion debate—or listen to her talk about it on Honestly. Read her Atlantic archive here. Buy her books here and here. If I had to pick two of her pieces, I would say to read Caitlin’s article on Bill Clinton and #MeToo and her story on the college admissions scandal, which I’ll excerpt a little taste of:

Down, down, down she went in the FBI car, in her handcuffs and athleisure, down below Outpost, down below Lake Hollywood, down below the Dolby Theatre where she had been so many times—in a beautiful gown, with her famous husband, William H. Macy, beside her—to watch the Academy Awards, once as a nominee. All the way down to—my God!—the downest place of all: Spring Street. The federal courthouse! This was where Donald Trump was supposed to go, not Felicity Huffman. Cool your heels, defender of the downtrodden: There is no rushing through all this—the mug shot, the phone call, the hearing. And this can’t even be grist for the mill of a new devotion to the plight of American mass incarceration. You’re now Exhibit A of law enforcement finally treating rich, white Americans as unsparingly as it treats poor, black ones.

In a shallow and nasty era, Caitlin Flanagan is a complex, humane, deep writer. You don’t need me to sell you on her (all this doesn’t even count; this is just how I introduce her at dinner). You’ll start finding her words in your inbox, and you’ll see for yourself. She’ll usually be behind a paywall, but there’s none today—as a special treat.

Caitlin Flanagan is a Free Press columnist. Caitlin! Flanagan! We couldn’t be prouder.

—Nellie Bowles

I was born in the era of assassinations. I was two, almost to the day, when John Kennedy was shot dead, and by the time I was eight the same thing had happened to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. These were the most famous of the killings, but there were many more: Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, three civil rights workers who had traveled to Mississippi and been murdered by Ku Klux Klan members.

The ’60s dissolved into the ’70s and political violence rolled on, often in the form of acts committed by what seemed like endlessly proliferating radical groups who tied the possibility of enormous political change to limited acts of great violence. I grew up in two places, mostly in Berkeley but also in Ireland, and spent the Irish equivalent of first, fifth, and 10th grades there as well as most summers. In June 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles, and on October 5 of that year Northern Irish Catholics marched in protest of discrimination and were set upon not just by Protestants but by agents of the British state; most people believe that the Troubles began with this event.

We’ve once again crossed the river where we may not countenance violence of this kind, but we understand it as an aspect of the known world.

During those years I saw many things I should not have seen, even though I lived in Dublin, which was almost untouched by this violence. My family was in Derry on the first anniversary of internment—a policy of the British government whereby Irish Catholics could be imprisoned without charges or trials—and we got caught in some street fighting. Soldiers of the British Army were firing rubber bullets, and some people were so furious that they set their own houses on fire. My internal threat assessment is permanently stuck on high alert, and I think that experience had something to do with it.

The Black Panther Party was a presence in the Berkeley of my youth, as were a number of less disciplined radical organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence. I was 12 when the far-left Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst from her apartment off Telegraph Avenue, a significant event in the lives of many Berkeley kids. It was followed three months later by the worst after-school special in history, when the gang was tracked to a small house in Compton and the Los Angeles Police fired over 5,000 rounds of ammunition into it as well as tear gas that started a massive fire that killed most of the six people inside; others died of gunshot wounds. It wasn’t until the next day that police announced that Patty Hearst hadn’t been in the house, all of us glued to the television thought we were watching her burn.

My hatred of political violence makes me bewildered by my own response to the news of a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I glanced at my phone, took in the essential facts, and didn’t really feel anything at all. It just seemed like one more event that hovered on the edge of the real and the unreal. I was at a dinner party and when I got back to the table and told the other people sitting there what had happened, they all seemed to have the same response I’d had. Nobody reached for a phone to learn more, no one wondered about a motive; we had all absorbed the essential fact that nobody had been injured and we went on to other things.

That’s when I realized that political violence is truly back, that an attempt to assassinate the American president is within the realm not just of possibility but of the unremarkable, and that we’ve once again crossed the river where we may not countenance violence of this kind, but we understand it as an aspect of the known world.

Now that we’ve reentered the cycle, here are two things to know about political violence. The first is that young people are the most attracted to it, for the same reason so many young people enlisted in the military after 9/11: because they were aware of and angry about an intolerable situation, and because the condition of youth includes an awareness of one’s own physical power. It also involves a bravery that trembles on the edge of foolishness. That’s why old people don’t fight wars; they declare them. The second thing to know about political violence is that it produces romantic heroes faster than MGM in the 1940s.

The photograph of Huey Newton in a peacock chair, flanked by a gun and a spear, still occasionally appears in dorm rooms now, and the 1960 photograph of Che Guevara is as much a part of move-in day as the Starbucks logo. It’s also why even Luigi: The Musical can’t stop an infatuation with Luigi Mangione, the young man who allegedly murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, 17 months ago. All these men represent the romantic ideal of standing up against a seemingly intractable force—respectively, white supremacy, capitalism, and the profiteering of the American healthcare industry—risking their lives at the barricades and accepting whatever happens to them. When I saw a photograph of Cole Tomas Allen and learned that he, like the other three, is handsome, I knew that soon enough he would join their ranks.

I was 20 years old the day I walked through a student commons and heard that Ronald Reagan had been shot. The first thing I did was find a payphone and call my parents. I was young and callow and—because my parents were extremely opposed to Ronald Reagan, hated Ronald Reagan—I made a flip remark. My father cut me off at the knees: “This is very serious.” It was a different time.

A day after the Correspondents’ Dinner, I looked through as many video recordings of it as I could, partly to make it seem more real. I came across something that seemed to emanate from that different time. Weijia Jiang, the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association and longtime White House correspondent for CBS News, stepped to the podium to make an announcement. She said that law enforcement had requested that everyone leave the premises, and she also said that Trump “wanted to emphasize that nobody was hurt. He and the First Lady, the cabinet—everybody’s safe.”

The moment shimmered in the air. Donald Trump has called journalists “nasty,” “stupid,” “terrible,” “enemies of the people,” and many other vile things. The moment called for the people in the room to be larger than the president, for them to do what he might not have done had the situations been reversed. After a moment, one person, perhaps not a journalist, loudly cheered the news. But perhaps without intending to, he triggered something, and other people applauded as well, soberly and briefly, but in a recognizably American way. For those few moments, at least, the office was larger than the man. It was a moment in which journalists were upholding American norms and standards, two things the president breaks on an almost daily basis. Jiang said that the president also wanted to say that he would hold a press conference “in 30 minutes” and there was a big laugh, although not a cruel one.

I noticed that NBC posted the moment on TikTok, but with an edit. The moment between Jiang’s announcement that the president, his wife, and the cabinet members had survived was spliced together with the one in which she announced the press conference. The applause was gone; the laughter stayed. This is America right now, where nothing seems real and where your sympathies are open to constant manipulation. When I was a girl, the priest always asked for prayers for the United States, which seemed silly to me, like asking for prayers for the moon or gravity. For the first time in my life, I’ve been doing what those priests instructed.

For most of human history, the rich took it with them. Or tried to. The pharaohs filled their tombs with gold, furniture, jewelry, food, and servants (sometimes living ones). The great necropolises of Egypt were monuments to the belief that wealth was most useful in the afterlife. The Greeks buried their dead with coins to cross the River Styx. The Vikings entombed their leaders together with their ships and weapons and more.

While the wealthy of the medieval world did build for the living, it was overwhelmingly through the church and with an eye on the next world. The great cathedrals of Europe, the monasteries, and the hospitals were ecclesiastical enterprises, funded by a combination of royal grants, aristocratic patronage, and the steady accumulation of tithes. When secular wealth entered the picture, it was through mercantile families like the Medicis that turned wealth into symbols of political power. Politics, religion, and great earthly works were closely entangled for a millennia.

All that changed in the new world. America had no church establishment to staff hospitals and schools, no aristocracy to endow them, and no monarchy to hand out charters. What we had was money: made fast by men who had often started with nothing and found themselves, as the republic matured, in possession of fortunes they could neither spend nor comfortably hoard. They took upon themselves the public works that in the Old World were the work of the nobility and the church.