It’s Thursday, December 11. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Has Trump made everyone worse? Is the left to blame for the rise of Nick Fuentes? Plus: Are “special” government employees engaged in self-dealing? The novel that explains life in a crumbling regime. Free Press meetups in a town near you. And much more.

But first: Where do the Republicans go next?

The GOP was one party under Trump when the 47th president assumed office in January. But now, at the end of 2025, a growing share of the party’s populists believe Trump has betrayed the movement he created. That faction includes online influencers like the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and the irascible libertarian congressman Thomas Massie. And now, its most visible face may be Marjorie Taylor Greene—one of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress until a short time ago.

“America First should mean America first and only Americans first, with no other foreign country ever being attached to America First in our halls of government,” Greene said recently in a video announcing her pending resignation to her fans. Her message was veiled, but impossible to miss. Her allusion to foreign influence is meant to implicate Israel, which many of her supporters believe has forced Trump to bury the Jeffrey Epstein story, among other supposed betrayals.

But what do Republican voters make of this split? Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold visited Greene’s district in Georgia’s rural northwest to look for an answer to that question.

What she found there should worry the president. Read her dispatch on the rift tearing through the Republican base to find out why.

Things aren’t much better for the GOP back in Washington.

Republicans in Congress emerged from last month’s government shutdown believing the public had their back, but Democrats’ attacks over expiring health insurance subsidies have the GOP scrambling to pass a plan and show a sliver of competence on the issue. In an illuminating essay for us today, Yuval Levin, who has been at the heart of debates on this issue for decades, describes why Republicans keep coming up empty whenever they try to put forward a plan to control healthcare costs and put voters at ease.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” This famous line from The Leopard has become a shorthand for moments when a ruling order senses its own looming downfall. And it feels eerily relevant now, in an age when the liberal order we cherish seems increasingly unsteady. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s classic novel is about what it feels like to live inside history—inside the collapse of a social order and the disorientation that accompanies the fall of a ruling class.

In the latest episode of Old School, historian Dominic Green joins Shilo Brooks to explore why today’s American and British establishments resemble Sicily’s fading aristocracy: oligarchic, overregulated, and increasingly contemptuous of the people they rule.

For paid subscribers only, Free Press Meetups are coming to five cities—no panels, no scripts, just sharp conversation with curious, independent-minded readers. Best case, you leave with a new friend (or romantic prospect); worst case, it’s an above-average night out with a fresh group of people.

Get Tickets Now

Three months after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press and editor-in-chief of CBS News, sits down with his widow Erika Kirk for a conversation on life, loss, and the state of political discourse. The town hall will be broadcast on Saturday, December 13, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the CBS television network, and will stream on Paramount+ and CBS News 24/7.

• Eileen Higgins won the Miami mayor’s race Tuesday night. She will become the first Democrat to hold the office in nearly 30 years, and many see her victory as a sign of how Trump’s immigration crackdown is alienating Hispanic voters. Democrats also narrowly flipped a solidly Republican state house seat in Georgia.

• The Trump administration must withdraw its deployment of roughly 100 National Guard troops in Los Angeles by Monday, a federal judge ruled yesterday. The ruling states that the federal government illegally kept the troops long after immigration protests during the summer had ended.

• Increasing pressure on Ukraine to accept a peace plan with Russia, President Trump said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky “is going to have to get on the ball and start accepting things.” While Zelensky has agreed to take steps toward having elections, he has not agreed to cede any territory and wants to take out “anti-Ukrainian points” in the agreement.

• Foreigners who can travel to the U.S. visa-free may have to undergo a review of their social media profiles if a proposal from U.S. Customs and Border Protection goes into effect. Listing social media profiles on applications for entry has been an optional part of entry applications since 2016.

• While Trump rates the economy an “A+++++,”a Politico poll found that nearly half of Americans find it hard to pay for food and a majority blame the Trump administration for high prices. More than a quarter said they had skipped a medical checkup in the last two years because of costs.

• Sperm from a European donor who unknowingly carried a cancer-causing gene has been used to conceive at least 197 children, a joint investigation undertaken by numerous European news services revealed. People with the gene have a 90 percent chance of developing cancer, and some of the children have already died from cancer.

• Elon Musk implied he somewhat regretted running the Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year. “Instead of doing DOGE, I would have. . . worked at my companies, essentially, and they wouldn’t have been burning the cars,” Musk told interviewer Katie Miller, in reference to acts of vandalism against Tesla vehicles.

• As part of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s push to rid the department of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, the State Department will switch from the Calibri font back to the more traditional Times New Roman font. Calibri, according to the department, had been adopted to assist people with disabilities, but had failed. “Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s correspondence,” Rubio wrote.

“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” This famous line from The Leopard has become a shorthand for moments when a ruling order senses its own looming downfall.

And it feels eerily relevant now, in an age when the liberal order we cherish seems increasingly unsteady. We are living in a moment when we shout “regime decline” f…

RINGGOLD, Georgia — From behind the counter of a gas station, Lauren Epperson leaned over to tell me that she used to love President Donald Trump.

“Yep,” she said, smacking her lips. “Used to believe every word he said.”

Not anymore. The first nail in the coffin was Israel, which Epperson said she realized has been “blackmailing” the president and the entire federal government for decades. But the death knell was months of resistance by the president to releasing the federal government’s files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I don’t like him anymore,” said Epperson, 41 and the mother of two kids, while counting bills near the cash register. Trump is “a sellout—just like all the people I’ve loved and voted for. Oh, they got me good.”

It feels like a lifetime ago that Elon Musk palled around with President Donald Trump and slept on the floor of an office just steps away from the White House. The world’s richest man was classified as a “special government employee” while leading the cost-cutting crusade known as DOGE.

In the latest sign that Musk is gone but not forgotten, some House Democrats will introduce legislation on Thursday aimed at closing what they claim are loopholes in federal law for special government employees (SGEs) like him.

The bill would ban many such employees and their companies from receiving over $1 million in funding per year from the agencies where they work, according to a copy of the bill’s text reviewed by The Free Press. The bill also would create a searchable database of SGEs. There now is no centralized tracking and disclosure system for such employees.

Sometimes in politics, you win not by changing the world but by changing the subject. That’s how the Democrats won this fall’s government shutdown.

It didn’t look like a win for them at first. Progressive activists and many Democratic members of Congress fumed at their leaders for failing to draw any substantive concessions from Republicans. But when the dust settled, the concrete results of the shutdown were three more months of Biden-era spending levels and a healthcare debate that would stretch toward the midterm elections.

Reigniting the healthcare debate was a triumph for Democrats, since healthcare is Republicans’ worst issue and greatest vulnerability. This has been true for two decades. Republicans have struggled to reach an internal consensus on health policy since George W. Bush’s second term, because the economics and politics of healthcare have never lined up well for them.

In medical school, I planned to be a primary care doctor. I started residency at a Harvard teaching hospital, caring for patients that included multigenerational Armenian and Irish families as well as students from nearby colleges. I quickly saw the reality of the primary care system: rushed, fragmented, impersonal, and often inaccessible. My patients arrived in the exam room frustrated after waiting over an hour, and their frustration was justified; I had to see so many people so quickly that I could barely keep track of their names.

For decades, insurance and health-system pressures have required doctors to see more patients in less time. Visits narrow to whatever symptom is in front of you, and the view of the whole person is forgotten. Physicians learn to signal that their time is scarce. Questions are hurried, at best. Patients, sensing or experiencing judgment or dismissal, grow quiet. Many end up avoiding anything but the most urgent medical visits altogether.

Primary care doctors are supposed to be medicine’s first line of defense. A doctor familiar with your medical history can understand the entire state of your health, not just the problem you came in with. That influences whether you get preventive screening, early disease detection, and a thoughtful approach for further treatment. Yet most people spend almost no time thinking critically about choosing a primary care provider; they open the insurance directory and pick whoever is available. Their experience of primary care is often so negative that they can’t see how it matters.

In the Coen brothers cult comedy The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) says, “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos.” His point is that when you have no identity, Nazism at least gives you a sense of who you are, and of purpose.

It’s a funny line, but now that a rising political influencer in America is an Adolf Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying 27-year-old incel named Nick Fuentes, we ought to take Sobchak’s observation more seriously. Fuentes positions himself as the voice of a generation of lost white males, and though he comes off as a hysterical ranter—he praises both Hitler and Joseph Stalin—it’s a mistake to underestimate him. Say what you will about the tenets of Groyperism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos.

What is that ethos? Fuentes, now riding high on the boost Tucker Carlson gave him, laid out his core tenets in a couple of recent clips. In this one, he says he is “principally engaged in” trying to organize whites as a political group, to “raise the consciousness of an army.” Why is it, he asks, that Jews, Muslims, and racial minorities have political consciousness, but that is taboo for whites?

President Donald Trump’s greatest gift to America this year was to liberate people to be their worst selves. It’s okay to relish extrajudicial killings. Hey, it’s just some stranded Venezuelan drug mule clinging to the side of a bombed-out boat. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement.”) Trump has made it unexceptional to see a terrified Guatemalan housepainter (or as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt put it in March, one of the “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country”) being bundled by masked agents into a car that will speed him to a supermax in oblivion. After a possibly PTSD-addled Afghan was charged with shooting two National Guard officers in Washington, D.C., and with killing one of them, Trump halted naturalization ceremonies for immigrants, who were poised to become U.S. citizens after years of waiting, from “high-risk” countries. This year has been a master class in the exercise of casual inhumanity.

Earlier today, the Norwegian Nobel Institute held a ceremony in Oslo to award the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. Machado has been in hiding since July 2024, after authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in fraudulent presidential elections. She is widely considered the figure keeping the opposition alive against Maduro’s violent regime.

Machado was unable to attend the event in person, with the Institute describing the “extreme danger” of smuggling her out of Venezuela. Her daughter, Ana Corina Sosa Machado, delivered the speech on her behalf.

In the speech, Ana made an announcement: Her mother had made it out of the country after all—and would be arriving in Oslo within hours. Meanwhile, on Wednesday afternoon U.S. forces seized a sanctioned oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast, a move that comes after weeks of intensified pressure from Washington on Maduro’s regime.

It’s a dramatic moment in the ongoing struggle over Venezuela’s future. Today, we’re honored to bring you Machado’s speech in full, beginning with an introduction from Ana. —The Editors

Good afternoon,

First, I want to express our infinite gratitude—from my family and from an entire country—to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Thanks to you, the struggle of an entire people for truth, freedom, democracy, and peace is today recognized around the world.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’re introducing 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. We can’t all squeeze into the same car for a sightseeing tour of two and a half centuries of history, but at least we can share the same guide. That’s what we hope this newsletter can be.

Jonathan is the perfect man to have behind the wheel of our capacious station wagon—a historian who has shown himself comfortable in all the centuries of our nation’s history. His latest book, “The Fate of the Generals,” tells the amazing story of the doomed stand that General Jonathan Wainwright and his men made in the Philippines in 1942 and the great courage he showed afterward as the highest-ranking American prisoner of World War II. Even more relevant for our divided times, though, is his immensely compelling account of George Washington’s final years, showing the twilight of the father of our country and his battles against its new (and violently divisive) politics.

Jonathan begins his inaugural newsletter with the 300th birthday of the “forgotten” founder who planted the seeds for the Bill of Rights and was a major inspiration for parts of the Declaration of Independence, too. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here.

—The Editors

In 1825, the year before the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, an elderly Thomas Jefferson received what must have been a most unwelcome letter. Henry “Black-Horse Harry” Lee, best remembered today for being the half brother of Robert E. Lee but known back then for his scandalous marital indiscretions, wrote to insinuate that the credit Jefferson had received for the Declaration more properly belonged to a fellow Virginian, George Mason. Mason wasn’t among the Declaration’s signers, but with this week marking his 300th birthday, it’s time to acknowledge his great influence.

Born on December 11, 1725, Mason was widely admired by his fellow founders. Jefferson called him “one of our really great men and of the first order of greatness.” Though George Washington himself may never have called Mason a mentor, historians have often viewed their relationship that way. When the master of Mount Vernon sought advice on political developments in the run-up to the revolution, it was only natural to look a few plantations down the Potomac to Gunston Hall, where the erudite older Mason lived.