The Free Press

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 the 250th anniversary of the Halifax Resolves. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

For anyone who has ever experienced the embarrassment of sharing a news story and finding out only afterward that it was too good to be true, here’s some solace: John Adams could relate. In June 1819, he forwarded to fellow ex-president Thomas Jefferson a newspaper article claiming that Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, had declared independence from Great Britain on May 20, 1775, in terms strikingly similar to the ones Jefferson would use the next year when drafting the Declaration of Independence. Bitter that Jefferson had gotten “all the glory” for a document that Adams denigrated as a “theatrical show,” the New Englander relished evidence that the Virginian had stolen some of his most vaunted phrases, including “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” from the Carolina backwoods.

It’s Wednesday, April 15. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Maya Sulkin reports on the people cheering on violence against OpenAI chief Sam Altman. Mike Pesca on the autocrat who got voted out. Michael Horn on the financial crisis hitting America’s colleges. And much more.

But first: the Catholic case for the Iran war.

Lately it seems that many of our political conflicts are really theological ones, particularly when the American president is taking jabs at the first American pope. Just consider the debate over the Iran war. As The Free Press reported last week, senior Pentagon officials lectured top Vatican diplomats on how the Holy See should get behind President Donald Trump’s military campaign.

That happened behind closed doors. Now it’s all broken out in public, with both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance—a convert to Catholicism—engaging in a war of words with Pope Leo XIV. When Trump threatened to level Iran’s civilian infrastructure and end a “whole civilization,” Pope Leo called Trump’s comments “truly unacceptable.” Trump responded by saying the leader of the Catholic Church was, among other things, “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.”

That brings us to today. The U.S. has blockaded the Strait of Hormuz and is turning back ships leaving Iranian ports. Democrats hope Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo will help them peel off some conservative-leaning Catholics. And the Pontiff says that, while he has no appetite for criticizing Trump, he’s also not afraid of the president.

The Pope is clearly on one side and the Trump administration on the other. But within the Church, the dividing lines are not so neat. Many of us American Catholics think the war with Iran ill-conceived.

But many others believe the war is justified, including Father Gerald Murray, an expert on canon law, and on what makes a “just war” in Catholic tradition. He explains why he thinks the strikes on Iran are just in our pages today. Agree with him or not, Murray is one of the country’s foremost Catholic thinkers, and his case is worth considering.

As for the progress of the war itself: So far, the U.S. blockade against Iranian ports seems to be holding. Aaron MacLean breaks down how it works, what it would take to force Iran to the table, and whether Iran’s leaders will cut a deal to save themselves or go down with the ship.

And on the latest episode of the School of War podcast, Aaron is joined by maritime history and shipping expert Sal Mercogliano to dive deeper into the history of naval blockades—how past ones have fared and what it would actually take to open the Strait of Hormuz.

—Will Rahn

• Israel and Lebanon agreed to “launch direct negotiations” following their first face-to-face talks in more than 30 years yesterday in Washington, D.C, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. A statement from the State Department reiterated each side’s core positions—Israel demanding the disarmament and dismantling of terror groups like Hezbollah and Lebanon asserting its territorial sovereignty—while the U.S. made clear any ceasefire must be brokered by Washington, not Tehran.

• The Trump administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela’s state-controlled banking system, unlocking the country’s access to the broader global financial system for the first time in years. The relief comes as the U.S. tries to expand development in the Venezuelan oil sector and shore up the fragile government of acting president Delcy Rodríguez, who took power following the U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro in January.

• Trump publicly rebuked Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni Tuesday in a blast at one of his closest European allies, saying he was “shocked” by her after she refused to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “I’m shocked by her,” he said. “I ⁠thought she had courage. I was wrong.”

• Democratic California representative Eric Swalwell and Republican Texas representative Tony Gonzales both resigned ahead of expected expulsion votes over separate sexual misconduct scandals. A new accuser also came forward against Swalwell, alleging he raped her in 2018.

• A federal appeals court ordered Judge James Boasberg to shut down his criminal contempt investigation of the Trump administration. The D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that Boasberg’s yearlong probe into whether officials defied his order to halt deportation flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador was a “clear abuse of discretion.”

• Representative Jamie Raskin introduced legislation that would create a commission to evaluate the president’s fitness for office and determine whether the 25th Amendment should be invoked to remove him, drawing 50 Democratic cosponsors. The bill has little realistic path forward given Republican control of Congress.

Sal Mercogliano, associate professor of history at Campbell University and host of the What’s Going on with Shipping YouTube channel, joins the show once again to discuss the naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz imposed by United States Central Command. How might this blockade unfold? Is it a tactic to bring Iran back to the negotiating table, or a st…

The Vatican and the White House have spent much of the last week arguing about the war in Iran, from the behind-the-scenes confrontations reported on in our pages to a more public war of words between Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV. The president called the Pontiff “WEAK on crime and terrible for foreign policy” in a social media post on Sunday. “I have no fear of the Trump administration,” said Pope Leo the next day. But this clash belies a more complicated reality, with American Catholics divided on the war. Father Gerald Murray, an expert on canon law and what makes a “just war,” is one of the country’s foremost Catholic thinkers. Below, he explains why he thinks this war meets the conditions for a just war according to Catholic doctrine. —The Editors

Is the United States war against Iran morally justifiable? There is a strong argument that it is, because the American and Israeli attack on Iran’s leadership and military meets the centuries-old conditions for a just war under the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The Church is not pacifist in her doctrine. Waging just war is a last resort to protect the innocent by defeating the enemy. It is a virtuous act to take up arms in defense of the nation against an unjust aggressor.

Does this mean that one must wait for the enemy to attack before a nation can commence morally legitimate military action to neutralize the threat? No, that would be a dereliction of duty if the intent and capabilities of the prospective aggressor were known with certainty. The Iranian regime is a relentless enemy, using proxies to kill Americans and America’s allies. There is no doubt that Iran has been and presently is a grave threat.

The United States and Israel undertook the attack on Iran principally to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. In February of this year, American negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as Witkoff revealed to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, were stunned by what the Iranian side told them: “Both Iranian negotiators said to us directly with, you know, no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60 percent [enriched uranium] and they’re aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance.” Witkoff continued: “Jared and I opened up with the Iranian negotiators telling us they had the inalienable right to enrich all their nuclear fuel that they possessed.”

Hampshire College, a respected liberal arts school in Massachusetts, announced Tuesday that it would be closing its doors because of ongoing financial troubles.

This should not come as any great surprise. In fact, you should expect many similar shutterings in the coming years.

It’s no secret that higher education is reeling. The litany of challenges is long. Among them: struggles over free speech, antisemitism, and ideological uniformity; President Donald Trump’s many attacks on the sector;, a replicability and peer review crisis in research, and declining public confidence in colleges.

Then there’s also student debt, a declining percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college, low graduation rates, increasing questions around a college education’s return on investment, and a free-for-all in college athletics.

I could go on. But there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s received relatively less attention, however: the fiscal health of many colleges themselves. To put it simply, a tremendous number of colleges and universities are on the fast path to insolvency, which stands to quickly transform not only America’s higher-education landscape but also the many communities built around these institutions.

Viktor Orbán has been defeated. That is good for Hungary, good for Ukraine, and good for anyone who believes the will of the people should mean something. It is also, if we are being honest, a problem for a certain kind of political analysis—the kind that spent years insisting Orbán was something that the election results now suggest he wasn’t.

Orbán was a right-wing strongman: genuinely reactionary, an obstinate bully on the world stage, and, by any reasonable accounting, corrupt. He was an intellectual hero to J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. He proudly called Hungary an “illiberal democracy”—his way of saying that the institutions would serve the party, not the other way around. For a while, Hungarians liked what he was doing. Then they didn’t. And they voted him out.

That last sentence is the one I want to linger on.

On his HBO show a week before the election, John Oliver said “independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections” since Orbán took power and started changing laws, “free but not fair, which is an interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.” The audience gave a big laugh.

He then threw to the Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who argued: “We tend to think of a coup as happening with tanks in the streets, you know, and the military takeover and the announcement on radio that all civil liberties have died. That’s not what autocracy looks like anymore. You don’t get phalanxes of tanks. You get phalanxes of lawyers.”

“Sam Altman is, like, evil as shit.”

“This should be a nightly occurrence.”

“All I can say is I’m disappointed that they didn’t train their aim.”

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

These were just some of the messages on Reddit and social media in the hours after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was attacked. The point, in all of them, was the same: Altman had it coming.

On Friday, April 10, at 3:45 a.m., Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s San Francisco home while Altman, his husband, and his baby were asleep. It set the exterior gate on fire.

Donald Trump’s blockade of Iran, announced after the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations in Pakistan last weekend, has begun, and early reports suggest it is working. But its strategic goal is to bring Iran to a more serious diplomatic position—and success there remains a long shot.

Despite some confusing rhetoric over the weekend, the United States has not actually blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, as such, in really any sense at all. The source of the confusion was the president himself, who announced on Sunday that the “United States Navy . . . will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” This announcement didn’t make a great deal of sense. First of all, Iran was already engaged in a de facto blockade of the strait, and had been choking traffic through it to a minimum since early March. Each day it allowed through a handful of ships that were carrying Iranian cargo or, it seems, paying a toll to Iran. It would make sense for America to stop this Iranian-approved traffic—but why announce that we are stopping all the rest of the traffic, from Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia—legal traffic from our partners that also needs to sail through the strait, destined for the world’s markets? Some of these ships were even our own.

Enter U.S. Central Command, the military organization tasked with American operations in the Middle East, which clarified a few hours later that, beginning at 10 a.m. ET on Monday, the U.S. military would blockade “all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports.” This made a good deal more sense. Iran had taken the world’s economy hostage by blocking lawful commerce out of the strait. Now the U.S., on behalf of the global economy, would even the playing field by starving Iran of the revenue it earns from maritime trade. The blockade would also extend to ships leaving Iranian ports on either side of the strait. (Iran has some significant port facilities on the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, in addition to within the strait, which is in the Persian Gulf.)

Of all the charges leveled at Donald Trump during his second term, among the most serious is that he is dismantling the rule of law in the United States. It’s a fiercely contested claim that concerns one of the most important features of our constitutional republic, and nowhere is the debate more ferocious than when it comes to the president’s relationship with the Supreme Court.

Conventional wisdom holds that when a U.S. president attacks the Court, the rule of law is in danger. It’s an argument that resurfaces again and again—most recently as Trump publicly clashed with the Court over tariffs and birthright citizenship.

But does that assumption actually hold up? Is Trump weakening one of the country’s most vital institutions? Attorney, former Department of Justice spokesperson, and political commentator Sarah Isgur argues that the answer is no—and that the prevailing narrative misses the mark entirely.

Today, in an exclusive excerpt from her new book, Last Branch Standing: A Potentially Surprising, Occasionally Witty Journey Inside Today's Supreme Court, she makes a provocative claim: Throughout American history, presidential attacks on the Court have not weakened it—they’ve made it stronger. Trump, she says, is no exception.

—The Editors

Earlier this month, Donald Trump made history by being the first president to attend Supreme Court oral arguments. The arguments in question were over the constitutionality of his executive order limiting birthright citizenship, which he signed in January 2025 before it was swiftly blocked by a series of preliminary injunctions.

It’s unclear what the president’s goals were in sitting in—though shortly after his return to the White House, he angrily wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. is “the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” But whatever his motives might have been, it didn’t appear to make the judges any more receptive to his argument. All nine ranged from deeply skeptical to outright hostile to the administration’s position.

This isn’t the first time Trump has expressed overt animosity toward the Supreme Court. As an attorney and former Department of Justice spokesperson, I frequently get asked about the health of the Court and the rule of law in this country. The people asking these questions aren’t rabid partisans. They are normal, smart people who see an institution that is under assault everywhere they turn. Headlines from the left argue that the Court’s conservative majority renders it illegitimate, and that it must be packed to restore basic fairness; while headlines from the right contend that the Court has unfairly defied Trump, and must be ignored to ensure democratic accountability.

It’s Tuesday, April 14, and Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day. For the past two years, the wail of a siren has signaled a frantic scramble for shelter in Israel. This morning, however, the nation froze. In their cars, on bustling street corners, and within the quiet of their homes, Israelis stood in complete silence for two minutes to honor the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Among those standing was Haim Shiloh, a 100-year-old survivor of both the Holocaust and the October 7 attacks. When the sirens blared that morning at his home in Kibbutz Nirim, Shiloh sought refuge in his shelter as rockets devastated the buildings around him. Shiloh survived the onslaught and was evacuated that night. Despite stating in an interview after October 7 that he did not believe he would live to see his home again, he returned to his kibbutz six months ago.

Shiloh’s experience is part of a larger tragic reality: About 2,500 Holocaust survivors were directly exposed to the October 7 attacks, and approximately 2,000 were forced to evacuate. While most survived the initial violence, the toll of displacement was heavy; roughly 86 of those evacuated survivors died in the months that followed.

The most enduring label of the October 7 massacre is “the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.” The reality is that, despite millennia of persecution, the Holocaust is so immense in its scale that it comprises the entire vocabulary through which the Jewish people process catastrophe.