The Free Press

It’s Thursday, February 5. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Trump said he was disbanding the Department of Education—so why is it still there? David Mamet on terrible writing. The real story behind ICE’s Minneapolis withdrawal. And much more.

But first: Will Rahn’s exclusive exit interview with New York’s Cardinal Dolan.

For the last 17 years, Timothy Cardinal Dolan has been the face and de facto leader of the Catholic Church in America. All that changes tomorrow when Ronald Hicks of Chicago becomes the new Archbishop of New York. So a few days ago, in his final week on the job, I sat down with Cardinal Dolan in his stripped-down Manhattan office for an exclusive exit interview.

There’s a bluntness to Cardinal Dolan that’s often refreshing, regardless of your religion or political affiliation. And that bluntness has been a powerful tool of late. Perhaps as much as any time in living memory, our political debates are religious ones. Dolan has been a powerful voice in these debates, particularly in the fight against antisemitism, which is on the rise among far-right influencers who profess the faith.

Last year, Dolan formally submitted his resignation to Pope Francis upon hitting the retirement age of 75. But Dolan was reputed to have worked skillfully behind the scenes to install Pope Leo as the first American Pope, so many church observers were surprised when Leo accepted the resignation in December instead of letting Dolan stay on.

What does Dolan say about that? Well, you can watch the video to find out.

Dolan is one of the last old-school, backslapping politicians—quick with a joke, and even quicker to remember your name and how he knows you. He’s been on the scene long enough to see the whole parade of history, and here takes a step back to reflect on it.

—Will Rahn

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet joins Shilo Brooks for a wide-ranging conversation on why he distrusts teachers, arts institutions, and anyone who tries to tell the public what’s good for them, and how he decides what’s worth reading—or throwing across the room.

• Tech stocks and Bitcoin sank this week amid lackluster earnings reports and shifting investor preferences toward more stable assets. Bitcoin fell to its lowest price alongside other cryptocurrencies, erasing nearly $500 billion in market value over several days.

• Would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh received a life sentence yesterday for his plot to kill the president at one of his Florida golf courses in 2024. A jury of 12 people found Routh guilty last September after an unconventional trial in which Routh insisted on representing himself.

• Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—the former Prince Andrew—moved out of his royal home in Windsor this week, following the release of documents revealing more details of his relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, including an email thanking Epstein for an introduction to a young Russian woman.

• At least 167 Nigerians were killed on Tuesday in attacks likely perpetrated by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. The attack is one of the worst in the country in recent years. Nigeria’s government has attracted scrutiny for failing to protect Christians from religious violence, though it is unclear whether Christians were targeted in Tuesday’s attack.

• Layoffs hit The Washington Post yesterday, as the publication cut one-third of its staff, shuttered its sports section, and shut much of its metro desk and multiple foreign bureaus. In an email to staff, executive editor Matt Murray said the cuts at the money-losing outlet were necessitated by declining search traffic and a business model “too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product.”

• The Supreme Court will allow California to use its redrawn congressional map, which favors Democrats, during this year’s midterms. Democratic advantages from the Golden State’s redistricting effort are expected to neutralize Republican gains from Texas’s new Trump-endorsed district boundaries.

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet spent his childhood cutting class and reading at the local library. His first pick was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, which he pulled off the shelves at just 11 years old.

Decades later, David thinks the book is terrible, its author “a horrible writer,” and its heroine an insufferable busybody. In this episode…

For the last 17 years, Timothy Cardinal Dolan has been the face and de facto leader of the Catholic Church in America. All that changes tomorrow when Ronald Hicks of Chicago becomes the new Archbishop of New York. So a few days ago, in his final week on the job, I sat down with Cardinal Dolan in his stripped-down Manhattan office for an exclusive exit i…

To understand where things stand in the Minnesota immigration war, it’s best to start by separating the politics from the policy. The killing of two U.S. citizens by immigration officers showed Americans the carnage that excessive force can cause, and it created the gravest political crisis of President Donald Trump’s second term thus far. A February 2 survey by YouGov found that half the country thinks Trump’s deportation strategy has become too harsh, and that Trump’s overall immigration policy has more critics than supporters. It’s a steep drop since the first half of last year, when Trump’s swift sealing of the border made immigration his best issue.

But is he losing the policy war as decisively as the political one? Much of the press seems to think so.

When White House border czar Tom Homan announced the withdrawal on Wednesday of 700 immigration agents from the Minneapolis area, news stories framed the pullout as nothing more than an admission of political defeat. The reports suggest that thousands of protesters, observers, and disruptors in the Minneapolis streets achieved an unconditional victory against an invasive federal force.

Yet the gears of Trump’s actual deportation policy are still turning behind the scenes of this political defeat. And if the new developments take hold, they could become one of the biggest policy victories of Trump’s term.

You may recognize the name Allie Beth Stuckey. A popular Christian conservative podcaster, she rose to prominence in the late 2010s after launching her show, Relatable. The podcast surged in popularity in 2020, as Stuckey gained notoriety for criticizing lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2024, she published a New York Times bestseller, Toxic Empathy, which accused the progressive movement of exploiting Christian empathy to advance its political aims.

Today, Stuckey is one of the most prominent voices on the Christian right. And last week, Hillary Clinton took aim at her in The Atlantic, casting Stuckey as the centerpiece of the MAGA movement’s so-called “war on empathy.” It’s a forceful essay, one that exposes a deeper clash between two visions of religious morality and the role it should play in public life. That’s one of the defining debates of this moment—which is why we invited Stuckey to respond. —Jillian Lederman

I’ll be honest: If I had made a list of predictions for 2026, being the target of a piece by Hillary Clinton in The Atlantic would not have made the cut.

But that’s exactly what happened.

In her essay last week titled “MAGA’s War on Empathy,” Clinton lambasted the Trump administration for the recent killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Their deaths, she said, encapsulate “a deeper moral rot at the heart of Trump’s MAGA movement. Whatever you think about immigration policy, how can a person of conscience justify the lack of compassion and empathy for the victims in Minnesota, and for the families torn apart or hiding in fear, for the children separated from their parents or afraid to go to school?”

She continued: “The glorification of cruelty and rejection of compassion don’t just shape the Trump administration’s policies. Those values are also at the core of Trump’s own character and worldview. And they have become a rallying cry for a cadre of hard-right ‘Christian influencers’ who are waging a war on empathy.”

Donald Trump smiled in March 2025 as he declared victory over the Department of Education in the East Room of the White House. Flanked by about a dozen students sitting in classroom desks, the president signed an executive order directing the agency to shut itself down and put education solely in the hands of state and local officials. The students signed their own copies of the order—and held them up for the cameras when Trump did.

Almost a year later, the Department of Education is still open—and is getting even bigger. The new federal funding package Trump signed into law on Tuesday funds the agency at $79 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends September 30. That is an increase of $217 million from fiscal 2025, $12 billion more than the White House requested in May, and a win for Democrats in Congress who helped negotiate the deal.

“Congress will not abolish the Department of Education,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a retired preschool teacher who is the second-highest-ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said last week after the Senate passed a spending package that included the agency’s funding. The House approved the measure by a vote of 217–214 on Tuesday after a brief round of negotiations with Republican holdouts.

Trump signed 225 executive orders in 2025 and another 10 so far this year, compared with 220 during his entire first term. Getting rid of the Department of Education “would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the president wrote in the order last March.

In the fall of 2025, as students readied for the AMC 12, the first in the series of math contests that lead to the International Mathematical Olympiad, a frightening realization started taking hold in the country’s elite math circles: Cheating had become so entrenched in the competition that it was threatening the very existence of the country’s most prestigious math contests.

The AMC 12, formally known as the American Mathematics Competition, had faced issues in the past with stolen exams. Last year, though, was different. It was not a question of a few leaked copies of tests passed from hand to hand a day before the competition. On Chinese sites like RedNote and WeChat, as well as Discord and even Reddit in the United States, copies of the yet-to-be-administered exams were openly for sale.

SOLANO COUNTY, California — About an hour and a half northeast from San Francisco, past Travis Air Force Base and the original Jelly Belly factory, you’ll find one man’s dream. It’s 68,000 acres of farmland, punctuated by windmills and sheep, but in Jan Sramek’s mind’s eye, it’s a bustling city of 400,000 people, about the population of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has a walkable commercial district, schools, offices, and rows of single-family homes where neighbors enjoy wine on each other’s porches at dusk. If someone—anyone! everyone!—would just agree to let him build it.

He’s been dreaming about this city for at least a decade. “My foundational belief when I started this was that the situation in California would get worse,” Sramek, 38, tells me from the driver’s seat of his Rivian truck. He thought the high house prices across the state would get higher, and that companies would start to leave, because California’s voters had been, in his words, “hoodwinked into this degrowth mind-set.” And so, in 2017, after a short career in business and finance, he started his company, California Forever, which aims to build “the next great American city,” right here in Solano County.

His first move was to spend nine months trying to talk himself out of it—“I tried to prove out that this would fail, because it seemed so outlandish and crazy”—before he decided it was, in fact, a great idea, and went out to investors. “I told them, ‘Hey, you should invest in this crazy thing that no bank or private equity firm or anyone else would touch,’ ” he said. “We should build something spectacular in California—partially as a for-profit investment, but partially as a way of giving back to the state.”

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 British general who coined the phrase “hearts and minds” as a military strategy. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

One man had come to America to bring peace through negotiations. The other had come to impose peace through war. Two hundred fifty years ago this week, Lord Drummond, a Scottish noble acting as an unofficial peace emissary, and Henry Clinton, a high-ranking British general, met on a warship in New York Harbor. The surprise is how much they agreed upon. During their conversation, Clinton summed up his preferred strategy this way: “To gain the hearts and subdue the minds of America.”

With that turn of phrase, a British general fighting to thwart the American Revolution articulated the doctrine that the nation born out of the struggle would later deploy itself in places such as Vietnam and Iraq: winning hearts and minds. Max Boot, in his book about the history of guerrilla warfare, credits Clinton with “the first recorded use of ‘hearts and minds’ in a counterinsurgency context.” No less of an authority than General David Petraeus has written that the phrase remains the “most succinct explanation for how to win a counterinsurgency.”

It’s Wednesday, February 4. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: An AI tool to hold politicians to account. The problem with Mamdani’s gifted and talented plan. Can we get politics out of the Fed? Nellie Bowles livestreams the news. And much more.

But first: Epstein.

The Jeffrey Epstein saga is a controversy without end. It is also, arguably, the defining scandal of our age. Even now, more than six years after the suspicious death of the shadowy financier and convicted sex criminal in a New York prison cell, his crimes and connections drive the news and loom large in our public life.

That’s been as true this week as any, after last Friday’s Justice Department release of more than three million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images from the so-called Epstein files.

Today, we bring you three perspectives on the meaning of the latest twist in the Epstein account.

Up first is Rod Dreher, who tries to make sense of the larger meaning of the Epstein story. If you want to understand the “tear it all down” rage that drives so much of our politics today, look no further than these documents, says Rod. Drawing ominous parallels with pre-revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, Rod argues that “the real meaning of the Epstein files is not likely to be found in its pages, but in what some ambitious genius convinces an increasingly polarized, increasingly anxious American populace to think they mean.” Read Rod on how Epstein and his elite can be anything you need them to be—and why that’s so dangerous.

Is this justice? That’s one question we’ve found ourselves debating in the newsroom this week, as the document dump dragged innocent names into the sordid story—and even inadvertently revealed the identity of Epstein’s previously anonymous victims. To Robby Soave, the answer is a clear no. Writing for The Free Press today, he argues that the push to release the Epstein files—something that Trump was in favor of, then opposed to, and Democrats were opposed to, then in favor of—sets a dangerous precedent. Welcome to a world where gossip, unverified information, and outright lies can be released into the world, consequences be damned.

And finally, Nellie Bowles, whose name was in the documents released this week because she once, as a business reporter at The New York Times, met Epstein for coffee. Her regret, she writes, is not that she met Epstein, or emailed him, but that she “had the chance to profile one of the darkest, most interesting characters of that moment, and I didn’t.” Read Nellie on the time she went to Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion to meet the man whose twisted life still drives investigations, conspiracy theories, and headlines today:

—Oliver Wiseman

On March 9, The Free Press is coming to Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to talk about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today. Coleman Hughes will be joined by Ambassador Andrew Young, who marched alongside King, and Jonathan Eig, whose biography King: A Life won a Pulitzer in 2024. At the church led by King, they’ll explore how the civil rights movement used nonviolence to bring Americans together and change the country—and what that strategy can teach us today at a time when America is at a boiling point. Book now to grab a seat for this unmissable conversation. Tickets and more details are available here:

• On Tuesday, French prosecutors raided the Paris office of the social media platform X as part of an investigation into child sex abuse images and deepfakes on the site. The prosecutors also requested Elon Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino sit for interviews in April.

• U.S. Forces shot down an Iranian drone on Tuesday after it “aggressively” approached the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln positioned 500 miles off the coast of Iran. The escalation comes as White House negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are slated to meet with Iranian officials on Friday in Istanbul to discuss Iran’s nuclear program.

• Blood was discovered in the home of Nancy Guthrie, mother of Today show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. The 84-year-old was reported missing around noon Sunday, according to local authorities. The sheriff’s department believes that Guthrie was abducted.

• After a four-day standoff, the House of Representatives voted 217 to 214 to approve a $1 trillion spending package that will end the partial government shutdown. Now they can tee up a new fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

• President Trump met with Colombian president Gustavo Petro at the White House on Tuesday, marking the first in-person meeting between the two leaders. “We’re going to be talking about drugs,” Trump said before the meeting, “because tremendous amounts of drugs come out of his country.”

• The American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to shift its guidance on gender transition surgery for minors on Tuesday. The decision came after a New York plaintiff won $2 million in damages this week for a mastectomy received as a teenager that she said left her disfigured. (Read Benjamin Ryan’s piece on that case: “A Legal First That Could Change Gender Medicine.”)

• Volodymyr Zelensky implored European allies to apply “maximum pressure” against Moscow after Russia launched hundreds of missiles and drones early Tuesday morning, targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Trilateral peace talks resume today.

• The Walt Disney Company named Josh D’Amaro, a nearly 30-year veteran of the company, as its next CEO, succeeding Bob Iger, who served in the post for nearly 20 years. D’Amaro currently oversees Disney’s global portfolio of theme parks and hotel resorts.

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