The Free Press

It’s Tuesday, December 30. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Tyler Cowen on a flashing warning light for the economy. Jed Rubenfeld on how Donald Trump’s recent loss in the Supreme Court could end up being a win for the president in the long term. Philanthropist Sigrid Rausing on why she pulled funding from some human rights organizations. And more.

But first: our 2025 heroes.

The problem with heroes is that they only appear when you have the misfortune of truly needing them. They are the people who show up when things have gone sideways. They save people, help people, or stand up for life and liberty despite sometimes terrible costs.

It should come as some relief that there are too many such people to count this year. But as 2025 comes to a close, we wanted to celebrate just a few that moved us.

So, without further ado, we bring you our non-exhaustive list of a few of this year’s heroes. Some are well known. Others are not. But they all did something great this year, and for that, we at The Free Press thank them.

Still, not every story we published this year deserves applause. Even the greats miss the mark from time to time, and that includes our roster of Free Press columnists.

As we take a long, hard look back at 2025, we’re publishing a brief exercise in accountability to keep ourselves honest, reflect on the times when we got it wrong, and even invite you to point and laugh as you see fit. Today, we admit to the takes we would like to take back. Read Niall Ferguson, Tyler Cowen, Nellie Bowles, Joe Nocera, Suzy Weiss, and other Free Press writers on what they got wrong this year.

—The Editors

• China launched military exercises around Taiwan, mobilizing naval, air, ground, and missile forces. The live-fire exercises come after the Trump administration proposed a $11 billion arms deal with Taiwan earlier this month.

• While meeting with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump said if Iran tried to rebuild its nuclear capabilities, “we’ll knock the hell out of them.” Trump also said if Hamas did not disarm quickly to pave the way for the next phase of his peace plan, “there’ll be hell to pay for them.”

• The Justice Department is using a law meant to punish businesses that cheat the government to investigate companies like Google and Verizon that it believes are still using diversity initiatives in hiring and promotion. The department is asserting that holding a federal contract while maintaining diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs constitutes fraud.

• The U.S. will contribute $2 billion to United Nations humanitarian aid, the most of any country but down from $17 billion in 2022. “Individual UN agencies will need to adapt, shrink, or die,” the State Department said.

• After meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday, Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky said that the two presidents were “90 percent agreed” on a revised 20-point peace plan and “100 percent agreed” on security guarantees. Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin had a “positive call” on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

• The U.S. conducted its first land strike against Venezuela in its counternarcotics efforts last week, President Trump confirmed. “They load the boats up with drugs, so we hit all the boats, and now we hit the area,” the president said Monday.

• Protests erupted across Tehran as Iran’s currency hit a record low against the dollar. The protests highlight how sanctions and soaring inflation have weighed down Iran’s economy, particularly since negotiations for sanctions relief ended after the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s nuclear sites in June.

• Beyoncé is now a billionaire, Forbes reported. The 44-year-old pop megastar is the fifth musician to cross the three comma threshold, joining her husband, Jay-Z, as well as Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and Rihanna.

The problem with heroes is that they appear only when you have the misfortune of truly needing them. They’re the people who show up when things have gone sideways. They save people, help people, or stand up for life and liberty despite sometimes terrible costs.

It should come as some relief that there are too many such people to count this year. But as 2025 comes to a close, we wanted to celebrate just a few who moved us.

So, without further ado, we bring you our non-exhaustive list of some of this year’s heroes. Some are well known. Others are not. But they all did something great this year, and for that we at The Free Press thank them. —The Editors

Danielle Sassoon had as bright a future as one could imagine when, in January 2025, the Justice Department named her to temporarily lead the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office—the most important in the country—while President Donald Trump’s nominee awaited confirmation. She had gone to Yale Law School, clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and prosecuted Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-imprisoned crypto mogul. She was highly regarded by the people she worked with. J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a federal appeals court judge for whom she also clerked, described her to The New York Times as “someone who’s very principled and rigorously honest and plays it straight.”

But shortly after being installed in the U.S. Attorney’s chair, she was asked—no, she was told—by her superiors in Washington, D.C., to drop a corruption case against New York mayor Eric Adams. Not because the evidence was lacking but because Adams had apparently cut a deal with the Trump administration to help round up illegal immigrants in the city in return for ending the case against him.

After that demand from the Department of Justice (DOJ), “veterans of the office quickly began to discuss among themselves how Ms. Sassoon might respond,” according to the Times. Her friends, however, had no doubt what she would do. She resigned.

In her resignation letter, she wrote that the order was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts.” Since he was reelected, Trump had used the Justice Department as a political vehicle—demanding that political enemies be prosecuted, and convicted friends be pardoned. In refusing to carry out what she saw as the DOJ’s corrupt order, Sassoon showed that integrity still mattered.

The Supreme Court last week blocked President Donald Trump’s attempt to deploy the National Guard in Chicago. The ruling in Trump v. Illinois is a blow to the administration—though not nearly as big a blow as many are reporting it to be.

In fact the Court’s ruling may have perverse consequences. While it limits the president’s ability to use the National Guard, it does not limit—and perhaps even encourages—the deployment of military troops in American cities.

The rationale is a little complicated, so let me explain.

Trump’s executive orders calling up the Guard in cities such as Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago have thus far relied on a 1994 statute known as Section 12406, which allows deployment of the National Guard without sign-off from a governor if the president is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”

’Tis the season for a long hard look at the past year, including all the takes we’d like to take back. From Trump’s tariffs to the merits of old age and the future of Gaza, our writers offered daring predictions and insights.

Reflecting on where we missed the mark is an important way to sharpen our coverage. So to keep ourselves honest, and to keep you entertained, here is a brief exercise in accountability as we look forward to the new year. —The Editors

This year, I really was wrong about why our government wastes money. I always knew the government was a little careless, a little silly. I’ve been following the California high-speed rail debacle for heaven’s sake, with more than $100 billion budgeted since 2015 and no high-speed track laid. I know how much San Francisco spends on “homelessness,” i.e., funding a vast array of nonprofit workers to wander around making sure addicts stay on the sidewalk as long as possible. I know these things. I think of them as absurdities that come from good intentions and silly plans. But then came the Minnesota fraud. It has rattled me to the core.

There is no way for corruption that deep to happen without massive collusion from regulators, whose salaries are, of course, also paid by taxpayers. So this is the year I realized that the government doesn’t accidentally misspend money—it does it on purpose! Until this year, it really never occurred to me that there could be true corruption like that in America.

To some extent this revelation is comforting: It reflects competence. It reflects sophistication, foresight, strategy, all of which I thought our elected officials lacked. So really there are pros and cons here. That’s just one thing I was wrong about, but the list is very, very long. Anyway, this is the year I open a Minnesota day care.

Sigrid Rausing is one of the most important philanthropists in the United Kingdom. The Sigrid Rausing Trust has committed £591 million in grants in its history, and it supports work on a wide range of human rights issues around the world. But, in the wake of October 7, 2023, the trust had to cut grants to some of the organizations it backed because of disturbing material those groups published that condoned Hamas’s violent rampage through Israel. In a piece first published in The Sunday Times that we’re reprinting today, Rausing writes about that decision, what happened afterwards, and how it is that organizations founded to protect human rights came to sympathize with terrorists. —The Editors

I founded a charitable trust in the United Kingdom nearly 30 years ago, working on human rights issues such as torture, conditions of detention, freedom of expression, and sexual violence in conflict.

The Sigrid Rausing Trust funds other causes, too, but human rights is our oldest program, and our area of expertise. We enter into long-term partnerships with our grantees, based on trust and shared values. Language—the only way to gauge those values—has always been important to us: We ask for clarity and brevity in funding applications and reports, and we mistrust inflated mission and vision statements. More importantly, following guidance from the Charity Commission, which regulates England and Wales’s nonprofits, we have strong clauses in our grant contract requiring grantees to abstain from incendiary language that may promote violence.

At times of heightened tension, we check our grantees’ websites and social media accounts. After the October 7, 2023 atrocities, a handful—only five out of some 400—had posted disturbing material: A group working on social and economic rights in Tunisia expressed “pride” (our translation) in the Hamas action. Another called for “support for the guerrilla Palestinian people in their war against the Zionist entity,” which they said “was shaken due to the action of the Palestinian resistance [. . .] invading the occupied lands and Zionist settlements.” A media group in Lebanon described the Hamas action as “resistance” to “colonization,” referred to the murdered civilians as “settlers” and dismissed Israeli information about Hamas’s atrocities as “lies.”

The outlier, if only in terms of geography, was a group in Canada that almost immediately termed Israel’s actions “genocidal,” and described the country as a “settler colonialist white-supremacist state.” The statement ended with an echo of a United Nations resolution; an affirmation of “the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determine their resistance.” It is a phrase which, given the context of the piece, we felt condoned the Hamas atrocities.

You might have heard of the run-up in silver and gold prices and thought of it as an arcane matter, largely of interest to metals traders. Unfortunately, it’s not. The rush for precious metals should worry us all. It reflects a new and possibly disastrous danger on the horizon.

The price of silver has reached new highs, and currently sits at around $71 an ounce—a gain of close to 140 percent for the year. Gold too is increasingly pricey, now over $4,300 an ounce. Why? The answer, in finance-speak, is that the economy is becoming more correlated. Translated to everyday English, that means we have fewer sources of financial protection if matters, either economically or politically, were to go very badly. And so precious metals are stepping into the hedge and protective roles that were once fulfilled by the U.S. dollar.

It used to be that if you were worried about the future, you would move into dollars as the safe haven—in finance terms a countercyclical asset, which stays resilient when higher-risk assets fall. But if the United States’ own government and policies are unpredictable, and its economy is volatile, you will look for some other hedges instead. Chaos in the U.S., and particularly in the White House, is pushing investors to find alternatives to the dollar.

None of us—not even Peter Thiel—will live to be 250. But the polities we create can last a very long time, if they do not expire in their infancy.

In 2026, the United States will celebrate a quarter of a millennium since the Declaration of Independence. Many people since Donald Trump’s return to power have taken to worrying that it will not last much longer. “I think this is how a republic dies,” Andrew Sullivan wrote back in August. Substack probably runs one essay a day on this theme. A month later, Zack Beauchamp gave us “This Is How Trump Ends Democracy,” an essay notable for the sentence “Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension . . . has shown us how authoritarianism can come to America.” He added, in the style of an indignant teenager: “I mean this literally.”

I have argued elsewhere why I continue to regard such fears as hyperbolic. But how surprising would it be if the American republic really did die on our watch? To address that question, it helps to know something about the history of republics.

It’s been quite a year: the second inauguration of Donald Trump, “Liberation Day,” the rise and fall of the DOGE, and so much other disruption in Washington, D.C. The first American pope. The rapidly escalating artificial intelligence (AI) race. Another year of bloodshed in Ukraine. U.S. strikes on the Iranian nuclear program. A hostage release and fragile ceasefire in Gaza. The murder of Charlie Kirk. The longest government shutdown in U.S. history. The massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia. And more.

Over the past 12 months, the headlines have at times been dispiriting or alarming—at others, hopeful, and even funny. As we wave goodbye to 2025, we asked some of the people we think are worth listening to what they learned this year. Here’s the wisdom they say they’re bringing with them into 2026. —The Editors

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, during the 12 Days of Christmas, Father Robert A. Sirico explains how Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” tells the season’s quietly revolutionary story: that of a God who embraces the world in all its imperfections.

We’re used to a certain Christmas aesthetic: warm, domestic, sentimental, festive. The imagery traces back to 1848, when an etching was published of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and their children in front of their decorated tree. Today, your living rooms may be littered with the modern evidence of this tradition: trees adorned with ornaments; oranges stuck with cloves; leftovers filling the refrigerators; extended family members lounging about the couches before traveling back home.

This spirit brings light to the holiday season. But, of course, the theological drama of Christmas began long before the Victorian era.

Welcome back to The Weekend Press! Today’s is a New Year’s edition. Suzy Weiss is looking back on the big cultural trends of 2025. Abigail Shrier has advice on how to cope when someone you love is doing something you hate. And Elliot Ackerman tells you how to dress fancy ahead of New Year’s Eve.

But first, we’re handing the mic to R.R. Reno, the devoutly Catholic editor of “First Things”—who has written us a gorgeous essay about his interfaith marriage:

Juliana’s rabbi could not officiate our wedding. This was a few decades ago, and in those days, very few rabbis would marry a Jew to a Christian, or indeed anyone of another faith. So, our wedding ceremony took place in the Church of the Redeemer in Baltimore, the Episcopal parish where I grew up, on a cold night in late December.

My mother-in-law was horrified when she visited the venue the day before the wedding. “How can you be married there?” she asked Juliana. “There’s a huge stained-glass window of Jesus!”

“Mom,” Juliana replied. “I’m getting married at 5 p.m. on the shortest day of the year. It will be dark.”

And so began our interfaith marriage, which is still going strong after 39 years. Juliana and I have both become more religious, more observant, more devout. I won’t pretend that it’s easy to believe different things. But it is a precious thing, a very precious thing, to have a partner who takes religion seriously.

Even if there are some compromises, and a little confusion for our kids.

Some years ago, when Santa paid a visit to our kids’ preschool, our daughter Rachel happily sat on his lap to whisper her gift requests. But on the drive home, she squirmed with worry: “Mom, don’t tell Santa that I’m Jewish.”

Juliana replied: “Sweetheart, if Santa knows when you are sleeping and knows when you’re awake, then he certainly knows that you are Jewish.”

At times like this, I’ll find myself thinking: God can write straight with crooked lines. Perhaps my story will have you thinking the same thing.

—R.R. Reno

If, after all this time with your family, you also need some Tough Love from Abigail Shrier—send her a note! If you’re a paying subscriber, write to her here; if not, subscribe today.

We’ve published plenty of other pieces this week that’ll distract you from the in-laws:

How should you spend the last weekend of 2025? Our features editor Dana Schuster has some ideas. . .

👀 See . . . Honestly, don’t see anyone. Don’t go anywhere. Everyone is sick. The flu, norovirus, Covid-19. Save yourself! Become a recluse. You’ll be in fine form for New Year’s Eve.

🍳 Eat . . . My friend recently had me over for a suburban confab and took what looked like whipped cream and sprayed it into my coffee. I was shocked, confused, and, ultimately, enamored. I asked her to text me a photo of the bottle. It was Silk Cold Foam Creamer in the maple brown sugar flavor. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since, have yet to purchase it, but plan to. It’s said to be quite addicting. I feel a little bad cheating on my handy splash of 1 percent milk. (Yes, real milk!) But ’tis the holiday season.

📺 Watch . . . The days are cold and dreary and nothing says pick-me-up like some beautiful people wearing beautiful clothes in beautiful locations. Emily in Paris is a palate cleanser for the winter doldrums, and I personally am rooting for her to land with the charming Italian cashmere heir, because, well, free wardrobe for life, girl!

That’s all, folks! Tell us what you think about this edition of The Weekend Press—or just tell us what you’re doing for New Year’s; we’re at [email protected].