The Free Press

For nearly five weeks, President Donald Trump has bombarded Iran with missiles and bombs—and the American public with contradictory messaging about the aims and duration of this conflict.

On Wednesday night he did it the old-fashioned way, with a 20-minute television address. The U.S. is “on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly,” he said, “very shortly. We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”

He also disclaimed all responsibility for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, saying that “the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage.” Earlier that day, Trump extended this invitation not only to the European members of NATO, whom he blames for failing to provide support for his military action, but also to South Korea, Japan—and China. Not for the first time, he could offer no details on the talks he claims to be having with Iranian representatives.

Only future historians will be able to work out if Trump has been procrastinating while talking. Could earlier action have been taken to secure the Strait? Could U.S. ground forces have been deployed sooner to reopen it? Does he still intend to deploy them? We cannot yet know.

But history does provide a useful point of comparison here.

On the blue subway line to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, there were two men in my car smoking joints. Sitting in a nest of filthy bags, there was a woman whose eyes were dilated and blank. There was also a man barking into the void, shirtless, washing himself with a flour tortilla, which would disintegrate, littering the subway floor, before he took out another and began the same process. This didn’t shock me, or anyone else around me, since I’d seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I’d ever ridden, every pedestrian walkway I’d passed through—and almost every community I’ve been to in the United States, save for those gated by wealth.

The numbers confirm it: Federal Transit Administration data puts Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA) passenger assault rate at roughly 20 per 100 million miles traveled in 2024—more than double every other major system in the country.

It appears Cuba has reached net-zero carbon emissions faster than any other country in the world. The transition is complete with blackouts, economic collapse, and widespread despair. Ten years ago, this is something I would have championed.

Back then I was in my 20s, working as a climate journalist and influencer. I covered pipeline protests, pushed the Green New Deal, and repeated slogans like “Just stop oil” and “Keep it in the ground.” I believed I was on the right side of history, fighting against the climate crisis, and for a more just and equitable world.

Now as I watch Cuba suffer from its lack of Venezuelan oil, and see the panic over the Strait of Hormuz, I’m reminded of the importance of oil and why despite spending trillions of dollars in an attempt to transition to renewables, oil, coal, and natural gas still produce 86 percent of the energy consumed around the world.

You might read this and think: Well, obviously fossil fuels are irreplaceable. But I can tell you from experience that is not how young people in the climate movement think.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — First, there’s silence. It’s an anxious silence. Everyone on the beach has been waiting for hours, knowing that any small hiccup—a gust of wind, a raindrop, an out-of-place cloud—could send everybody home, having witnessed nothing. But as the clock ticked closer to the appointed time—in this case, 6:24 p.m.—everybody turned their faces toward the horizon. For minutes, we all stood, watching an empty sky, disappointment starting to seep in. Then I blinked, and blastoff.

You see the rocket before you can hear it. The fire shooting out of the ground looks otherworldly. Logically you know it’s a feat of engineering, but it seems like magic: The force lifting the nearly 6 million–pound machine into the air and propelling it higher and higher up until it disappears. All you can see by the end is the thick white jet stream it left behind. About 60 seconds later, the ground starts to shake.

I was standing on a beach more than 10 miles from the Kennedy Space Center, but I could still feel the roar of the engines as we had liftoff. This was the launch of Artemis II, the first NASA-crewed space mission to head toward the moon since the Apollo missions. The astronauts and their ship, which they’ve nicknamed “Integrity,” are headed for a 10-day journey through space, circling the moon one time before returning to Earth off of America’s West Coast. If all goes according to plan, they will go farther from Earth than any human has ever been before.

Hey Abigail,

My dad passed in 2022. He wasn’t perfect—nobody is—but he was a good man. My mom, who’s 64 now, was understandably a wreck for years after she became a widow. She moved states to be closer to family, including me, and settled an hour away from my house. My wife and I would try to visit her every week, or invite her over. She often complained it wasn’t enough, but we tried to be understanding; being lonely is hard. My brother lives out of state but did what he could to try to be present and in touch with her. We encouraged her for years to make friends and even consider dating again—something she was initially 1,000 percent against.

Eventually she did start making friends, and that was going really well for a while. Then she started dating, and I thought that was good. She met a guy who’s 71 that she wanted to “go steady” with, and since then she has kind of gone silent on my brother and I. Neither of us are hurt or offended; we’re glad she’s no longer lonely and seems happy.

This guy is a problem, though. He filibusters every conversation, talking about himself, and is entirely uninterested in anyone else. He makes outlandish claims, like that he has cured his own diabetes and his congestive heart failure. He says that a 90-year-old woman pressed on his gums and cured his sciatica. As for his career, apparently Walter Isaacson should be interviewing him, because he’s more accomplished than Steve Jobs. When we get together as a family, I’m not talking to my mom—I’m listening to this guy spout off his pathological, medically impossible lies. His behavior is intolerable to a point that attempting to spend time with my mom feels like torture, because he’s always in the picture.

My wife, and my brother’s wife, also find his behavior outlandish. This isn’t a case of my brother and I begrudging our mom for being with someone new—we’re pleased she’s not alone—but I feel like I need to keep my mom at arm’s length so I don’t have to be exposed to this guy and his narcissism. I’m a Christian and I believe in the commandment that you should honor your father and mother, but this guy’s stunningly fantastical claims make it impossible to follow that commandment.

What can I do to maintain a good relationship with my mom in light of all this? If this guy could tone things down, it would probably be okay, but every time we see him there’s a new ridiculous story. I haven’t brought this up with my mom because I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but things as they stand now are unsustainable.

Joshua, 42

Joshua,

A horse walks into a bar.

The bartender says, “Why the long face?”

The horse replies: “I have AIDS.”

That I’m laughing, even now, having no idea why, is part of what makes this absurd joke so great.

For some reason, God or the universe gifted us this remarkable ability—to find humor in the ridiculous. To choose not to take everything so seriously all the time. This wonderful oasis of the soul lets us sidestep so many negative emotions: outrage, anger, hurt, indignation, and disappointment. We can refuse them all and instead laugh.

It’s Thursday, April 2. 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 Trump’s birthright citizenship case. Should we scrap presidential libraries? Kemi Badenoch on why Britain won’t tackle antisemitism. Is your home making you sick? And much more.

But first: Trump’s speech—and the state of the war.

Ahead of Donald Trump’s widely anticipated speech to the nation last night, some wondered if the president was about to declare the Iran war over and announce a deal with Tehran. Others speculated about boots on the ground or some other major change in course after a month spent fighting. But Trump delivered no such surprises last night: Instead, he restated the case for the war, declared that America was on track to meet its military objectives, and pledged to hit Iran “extremely hard” in the next two to three weeks before wrapping things up.

Eli Lake was watching the speech, and breaks it down in a piece for us this morning. Read his analysis on what Trump said, and what he is thinking:

The president was optimistic about the war last night. Was he right to be? To historian Victor Davis Hanson, the answer is a resounding yes. “The campaign has been brilliantly conducted,” he writes in our pages today, and will be over soon. And yet, he notes, the conflict’s critics make the “Orwellian” argument that we are losing. It’s just one of the ways in which the real hurdles for Donald Trump in this fight are not military, but political.

Reacting to Trump’s speech last night, Victor unpacks the war against the war, and lists the biggest challenges for the president in what he says will be the final few weeks of the conflict. Read his essay to understand where things stand in Operation Epic Fury—and where they’re headed.

Middle East expert and former George W. Bush adviser Elliott Abrams has a war-related question for the president. Why is he so quick to commend Israel as a staunch ally, yet so reluctant to acknowledge the help the war effort is receiving from Ukraine?

Yes, cooperation between Israel and the U.S. “surpasses any partnership in arms in the past several decades.” But Ukraine has supplied intelligence about Russia’s role in helping Iran, and has sent 200 counter-drone specialists to Middle Eastern countries that Iran is attacking—even as they are fighting their own war against Russia. The administration, writes Abrams, needs a “new understanding and appreciation of Ukraine.”

On May 18, Shilo will be taping a live episode of Old School in Philadelphia at the Jack Miller Center’s National Summit on Civic Education. He’ll sit down with historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Meacham to talk about history, leadership, and the future of the republic. Tickets include a cocktail reception and three-course dinner. Get $50 off with code TFP.

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• House and Senate Republicans agreed to a bipartisan deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security, ending the agency’s six-week shutdown. The spending bill would fund most of the department’s operations, while leaving out parts of Trump’s immigration crackdown, which GOP lawmakers plan to fund through other means.

• NASA launched its Artemis II mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday night, sending four astronauts on a 10-day mission around the moon and back. If the journey is successful, it will set a record for the farthest distance ever traveled from Earth: 252,000 miles.

• SpaceX has filed a confidential draft registration for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in what would likely be a record-setting listing, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The company, which recently merged with Elon Musk’s AI company xAI, could seek a valuation above $1.75 trillion—making it the largest IPO in history.

• New evidence cracked the 52-year-old cold case of 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime’s murder after DNA evidence definitively linked the killing to serial killer Ted Bundy. Investigators also said that the full DNA profile developed during this case has already been shared with other law enforcement agencies, and they believe it will help close at least one additional cold case tied to Bundy in the near future.

• Pakistan and Afghanistan held their first round of China-mediated peace talks Wednesday in the Chinese city of Urumqi after weeks of armed violence between the two countries. The conflict stems from Pakistan’s accusation that Afghanistan harbors domestic terrorists guilty of committing attacks within Pakistan.

In his speech on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump reiterated the aims of the campaign against Iran. It was clear from his address, and a video message from Secretary of State Marco Rubio a day earlier, that the U.S. intends to finish destroying the arsenal and factories of Iran’s ballistic missile program.

The U.S. will mostly end Iranian subsidies to its Arab terrorist proxies, while eliminating Iran’s air defenses, air force, navy, and ballistic missiles and drones. The intent is to so weaken Iran militarily and economically that it will be nearly impossible for it to produce a nuclear weapon. An implicit, though not articulated, objective is the humiliation of the theocracy to the point that it no longer can disrupt and terrify the Middle East, while emboldening popular internal resistance that will blame the ayatollahs for bringing ruin upon the entire country.

Trump vowed to hit Iran “extremely hard” over the next two to three weeks before ending the war. The remaining U.S. challenges of the campaign in this concluding period are as much political as military, and entail the following considerations.

In his widely anticipated speech to the nation, President Donald Trump said we were winning, without declaring victory. He boasted that military objectives were met ahead of schedule, but offered no date to end the war. “Tonight, Iran’s navy is gone. Their air force is in ruins. Their leaders, most of them,” Trump said, “are now dead.” Nevertheless, the war must go on. “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” he said. “In the meantime, discussions are ongoing.”

The president is threading a delicate needle. While his war on Iran is still overwhelmingly popular with his base, the majority of Americans disapprove. Gas prices have hit $4 a gallon. Markets are nervous. Iran is charging tankers for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Many in Washington expected the president to announce an exit ramp. Politico reporter Dasha Burns posted on X: “POTUS will use his address tonight to declare that the war in Iran is winding down.”

On the night of March 21, 2026, Cuba’s electrical grid collapsed for the third time in a month, the result of a fuel shortage triggered by a U.S.-imposed oil embargo, decades of underinvestment in a crumbling grid and, most consequentially, the post–Nicolás Maduro halt of Venezuelan crude, on which Cuba had depended for years to cover roughly a quarter of its oil needs. Eleven million people plunged into darkness. Hospitals, public utilities, and other critical services were thrown into chaos.

At the United Nations General Assembly, at summits, and on the floors of international forums, the leaders of Latin America’s democratic left have not been shy about where they place the blame. They have thundered. They have invoked international law, sovereignty, and human dignity to condemn Washington’s embargo against Cuba. But what about the more than 1,200 political prisoners sitting in overcrowded cells in Cuba, a historic record, their only crime having dared to demand freedom? Or the estimated 2.75 million Cubans who have fled the country in recent years, one of the largest peacetime exoduses in the western hemisphere’s modern history?

On the topic of the suffering of the Cuban people at the hands of their own government, Latin America’s democratic left remains shockingly silent.

The Supreme Court just heard arguments in not one but two important cases challenging Trump administration policies dealing with illegal aliens. In Wednesday’s case, regarding birthright citizenship, the administration is headed for defeat. In a different case last week, which involves President Donald Trump’s effort to stop illegal aliens from making so many asylum claims, the Court looked ready to hand the government a win.

This disparity is a great sign for the country. Many anti-Trumpsters blast the Court for kowtowing to the president, and they refuse to believe that the Justices might actually be trying to follow the law. But the rule of law is alive and well in America. The Court looks like it’s going to hand the administration one loss and one win in these two cases—and if so, the Court will be right in both.

Let’s start with the barn burner: the birthright citizenship case. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order purporting to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens and aliens in the U.S. on temporary visas. In oral argument on Wednesday, with the president himself in attendance, Solicitor General John Sauer did a yeoman’s job trying to defend this order, but a majority of the justices did not sound like they bought it.