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There are two Iran wars being waged at the moment. There is the real war, where America and Israel have pounded Iran’s vast nuclear program. Then there is the Iran war of the Democratic Party’s imagination, where that military campaign is somehow disconnected from Iran’s ability to race for a nuclear weapon.

In that second war, all of the bombing has led…

You may have noticed that life is rich with tragedies large and small, and it can be hard to tell the difference.

The loss of a job, a bad breakup, a nervous collapse: Where do these fall on the spectrum? Is there any way of knowing? Does it all depend on where they lead; on what comes next?

So goes my thought process as I make the routine mistake of googling my beloved New York Metropolitans. Record: seven wins, 16 losses, the worst in the National League. Last 10 games: zero wins, 10 losses. Payroll: $370 million, the second-highest in baseball.

My favorite player, Pete Alonso? He’s slugging for the Baltimore Orioles now. Big Pete, bullied as a child, a great beauty at the plate, had spent his entire career in the Mets organization and last year set the team’s all-time record for most home runs. He was a hero to the fans. But the Mets are the Mets, so they just let him go in free agency without a fight.

Brandon Nimmo, my second-favorite player? The good news is that he’s the best hitter on the team. The bad news is the team is the Texas Rangers. The Mets traded him away for Marcus Semien, who is barely hitting at all.

This brings me to the real question: Why am I doing this to myself?

Maybe it’s because baseball breaks my heart in a way I can handle.

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 a French plan to send covert aid to the American rebels. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

On April 19, 1776—250 years ago this week—patriot leaders marked one year since the Revolutionary War had begun with the Battles of Lexington and Concord or, as the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson would later put it, “the shot heard round the world.” Across the Atlantic Ocean, no one had awaited the sound longer and more eagerly than the French.

In the usual telling of the Revolutionary War, the story of Franco-American relations revolves around Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission to France and the Marquis de Lafayette’s quest to fight for liberty in America. But long before those two men crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions, a more secret history was being written by a French playwright named Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. By the first anniversary of the war, he and his allies neared approval for one of the war’s greatest pieces of theater: a covert plan to aid the American rebels.

It’s Wednesday, April 22. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is the perfect place for Trump. Eli Lake on the Iraq militias helping Iran. The next installment of Will Rahn’s investigation into what we know about UFOs. Plus: How screens changed everything. And much more.

But first: The unlikely Americans standing behind Haitian immigrants.

President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign once looked unstoppable. But today, the gang of dissenters is growing, including in some unexpected places.

The House voted last week to extend a program that lets about 500,000 Haitian immigrants temporarily live and work in the U.S. with no risk of being sent home. Four Republicans joined Democrats to support the extension to a program the Trump administration said last year it planned to scrap. Though the bill will likely stall in the Senate, the GOP defections reflect deepening unease with Trump’s approach.

The move in Congress to shield Haitians with temporary protected status signals a broader shift. At least one deeply conservative community is rallying behind these immigrants. Members of First Baptist Church in Panhandle, Texas, were shocked when they learned that two Haitian members of their church had received deportation orders, as Carrie McKean reports. Many First Baptist members voted for Trump, but they are now desperate to spare their neighbors from his deportation campaign—and they believe that they are upholding Christian values through their efforts.

But what if the law is on the president’s side? Haitians have suffered mightily, with causes including a devastating 2010 earthquake and unending political violence. But their fast track into the United States was meant to be temporary, Charles Lane argues, and the president gets to decide when to close it. Next week, the Supreme Court will hear a case about Trump’s effort to finally shut the door.

—The Editors

• President Trump extended the U.S.-Iran ceasefire on Tuesday, just hours before it was set to expire, saying he would hold off on attacks “until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.” The Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and each side continues to accuse the other of violating the truce.

• Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, faced his Senate confirmation hearing, pledging independence from the White House even as Trump said he would be “disappointed” if Warsh doesn’t cut interest rates immediately. Warsh’s nomination is in limbo, with Senator Thom Tillis vowing to block it until the Justice Department drops a criminal investigation of Powell.

• Virginia voters passed a redistricting plan that will help Democrats and boost their prospects in the midterm elections. The redrawn map will give Democrats a chance to flip as many as four Republican seats. Redistricting efforts have spread across the United States, with each party angling for an advantage in the battle to control the House.

• The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was indicted on fraud charges over its past use of paid informants to infiltrate hate groups. The Justice Department alleged that money from donors fueled white supremacy and extremism. The SPLC said it regularly shared what it learned with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI.

• Michael and Susan Dell are giving $750 million to the University of Texas at Austin to build what school leaders are calling the country’s first “AI-native” hospital, set to open in 2030 and designed to integrate artificial intelligence from the ground up rather than retrofit it onto existing infrastructure.

• The FBI is investigating possible connections between the deaths and disappearances of 10 scientists and staff at U.S. nuclear and space tech laboratories. The pattern has fueled online speculation about foreign espionage.

• Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ended the military’s long-standing flu vaccine mandate, saying service members can now decide for themselves whether to get the annual shot.

• Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Wall Street’s most prestigious law firms, apologized to a federal judge after submitting a court filing that contained AI-generated errors, including fabricated case citations. The mistakes were caught not by the law firm itself, but by opposing counsel.

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In an inconvenient development for President Donald Trump’s second Iran war, Tehran’s proxy forces in Iraq have emerged as a potent threat.

These are the powerful Iraqi militias that helped to defeat the Islamic State in the mid-2010s after the group captured Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in 2014. Today, those same militias have mounted sophisticated attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq and on civilian and energy infrastructure inside America’s closest allies in the war, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. According to The Wall Street Journal, the militias are responsible for drone attacks on the Kuwaiti consulate in Basra and the Emirati consulate in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

“Since the start of the conflict, the Kurdistan region has been consistently attacked externally by Iran and internally by the Iranian-backed militias,” Treefa Aziz, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Washington representative, told me in an interview earlier this month. Aziz said that the Kurdistan region has absorbed more than 700 attacks from drones, missiles, mortars, and rockets, resulting in the deaths of 16 people and over 90 serious injuries. “The militias are responsible for a lot of havoc, and the government in Baghdad is not doing enough to rein them in.”

Conservatives are tired of hearing progressives lecture them, especially about the Bible. On the issue of immigration, left-leaning advocates of migrant rights are quick to cite scripture, including many who don’t profess Christianity in their own lives. It can come off as an irritating bit of sophistry when aimed at lifelong churchgoers who prefer strict immigration policies.

And yet, what if the critics are right?

The command to aid the stranger in need, even at risk to oneself and against the taboos of one’s tribe, recurs throughout the New Testament—exemplified, of course, in the parable of the Good Samaritan. While theologians debate its precise meaning, and most folks merely take up their preferred party’s line, some politically conservative Christians accept that their obligation to strangers is no mere abstraction. In a rural part of the Texas panhandle, I spoke with members of one church who agree that their duty to help immigrants is literal and profound. And since Jesus describes his followers as those who “hear my words and put them into practice,” they are acting on their convictions each day.

I talked with Kimberly Snelgrooes last summer, not long after she’d finished teaching a missions class at the summertime Vacation Bible School at First Baptist Church in Panhandle, Texas. She asked a group of about 80 elementary school–age children if they knew what the word immigrant meant.

If ever a Supreme Court case shaped up as Goliath v. David, it would be Trump v. Miot, which comes up for oral argument on April 29. You know who Donald Trump is. Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot is one of about 350,000 Haitians currently permitted to live and work in the U.S. under a program called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, due to conditions in Haiti, which remains wracked by gang violence and poverty.

Trump is trying to end TPS for them, rendering them eligible for deportation, and Miot is suing to prevent that. As is often the case regarding immigrants, President Trump’s animus toward the Haitians is evident; remember the 2024 presidential debate when he said they were “eating the cats and dogs” in Springfield, Ohio?

Even some Republicans find his position extreme; 11 backed a Democrat-sponsored bill to extend TPS for Haiti through the end of Trump’s term that passed the House, 224-204, on April 16.

As is also often the case regarding immigration, however, Trump has identified a genuine problem, which in this case is the mutation of TPS, originally designed as a short-term safe haven program, into a de facto vehicle for large-scale, long-term immigration—not only by Haitians but also numerous others.

What’s more, the law is on Trump’s side, as the Supreme Court is likely to find—and probably should. Disruptive though it may be, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Miot could catalyze reform.

We live in an age of screens. They are everywhere: in our living rooms, on our streets, in our pockets. They’ve given us access to information beyond our wildest dreams—at the same time as they have spiked rates of mental illness, shortened our attention spans, and fundamentally transformed the ways we interact with one another.

Or, as Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber puts it in her new book, they have turned us into Screen People. It’s not just that we spend our lives looking at screens, she writes, in an excerpt adapted from the book; it’s that we’ve begun to behave as though we’re constantly being watched through them. We’ve self-isolated, retreating from any real-world interactions that can’t be edited or rehearsed to perfection.

In this environment, Garber asks, has “feeling seen” transformed from a blessing into a curse? And why, in an era with more options to connect to each other than ever before, are we increasingly, irrevocably, choosing to be alone? —The Editors

February 26, 2015, was an exceptional day on the internet. That afternoon, BuzzFeed writer Cates Holderness republished a picture she had come across on Tumblr: a dress, horizontally striped and topped with a matching bolero, hanging against a window. The post had a simple headline—“What Colors Are This Dress?”—and a brief explanation: “There’s a lot of debate about the color of the dress.” It concluded with a poll inviting readers to weigh in. Was the garment in question black and blue. . . or white and gold?

The dress quickly acquired the name recognition typically reserved for megastars: It became, simply, The Dress. Some saw one set of colors. Some saw another. There was no nuance to be found. Teams formed and clashed, each side absolutely sure that it saw the dress as it really was, and baffled by the other side’s delusion. Celebrities weighed in. So did politicians. So did God (or, at any rate, the widely followed Twitter account @TheTweetOfGod): “The color of a dress? Really? That’s what you’re asking Me?” it thundered.

The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCD) is unique for being the one night when America’s three centers of power—Washington, New York, and Hollywood—converge. Every April, just as the cherry blossoms are in bloom, social climbers of every variety descend upon the nation’s capital. Though the ostensible purpose of this annual gathering is to support the institution of America’s free press, anyone who has attended the weeklong bender of brunches, cocktail receptions, and after-parties knows that’s a thin patina of justification for dressing up, going out, and meeting famous people.

As an off-and-on veteran of the fetes surrounding the dinner (which I’ve never attended) for nearly two decades, I have had my fair share of celebrity encounters. Early in my career I was fortunate to befriend the late Christopher Hitchens, who for many years hosted the weekend’s most exclusive event, the Vanity Fair after-party, in his spacious Kalorama apartment. When the bash later migrated to the French ambassador’s residence around the corner, he sneaked me in. It was there that I overheard Scarlett Johansson complain that the subpar service of the Four Seasons in Georgetown should qualify it for a downgrade to “the Three Seasons.” I met Mike Myers, waited in line for the bathroom with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and watched Hitchens lacerate Richard Belzer for claiming 9/11 was an inside job. I sang “Hey Jude” alongside Don Lemon with Darren Criss on piano.

The vanity of the event is worth remembering as journalists lose their collective minds over this year’s dinner, set for Saturday night. After avoiding the black-tie gala for his first five years in office, President Donald Trump will grace the Hinckley Hilton ballroom with his presence, and the evening will have a deep resonance. This was the room where, in 2011, Barack Obama and Seth Meyers humiliated Trump before an audience of millions. As lore has it, it was then and there Trump decided to exact revenge on all the people laughing at him by running for president.

An Inconvenient Truth turns 20 next month. In the 2006 documentary, former vice president Al Gore argued that human-driven climate change was an urgent, civilization-threatening crisis. The film became a cultural phenomenon, winning two Academy Awards and making climate change one of the defining political issues of our time.

I am sure that there will be many retrospectives seeking to relitigate the scientific claims in the film. But the far more important anniversary story is not about the accuracy of any of Gore’s individual claims but rather about what the film helped to unleash in the scientific community: bringing partisan politics into the institutions of science.

Gore did not simply make a film about climate change: He implored the scientific community to join him in overt climate advocacy. The fuel that Gore added to the fire of pathological politicization of the climate science community is the most important legacy of An Inconvenient Truth.

Almost three years after the film’s release, Gore took the stage at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—the country’s largest and most prominent scientific organization—and delivered something much closer to a revival sermon than a scientific lecture.

Gore told the assembled scientists that they could no longer “in good conscience accept this division between the work you do and the civilization in which you live.” His directive was clear: