“This is a fatal decision.”

That’s how Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, described the Trump administration’s decision to end a federal partnership with the LGBTQ+ activist organization.

Since 2022, a federally funded suicide prevention hotline known as the 988 Lifeline has routed LGBTQ+ youth callers to The Trevor Project and other nonprofits to receive specialized support. Last Tuesday, the government announced that the hotline would, instead, serve anyone seeking help directly, through a single point of contact. The decision was met with howls of outrage.

For the last week, mainstream outlets like NBC News and PBS have breathlessly reported that the White House plans to “shut down” the national “LGBTQ youth suicide hotline.” By “pull[ing] the plug,” the administration has imperiled the lives of countless kids across the country, they say.

“Is cruelty the point?” mused CNN anchor Sara Sidner.

Reporter Katelyn Burns wrote for MSNBC that “this administration does not seem to care if trans children die.”

It would be a deeply disturbing story. If it were true.

In reality, nothing is being “shut down.”

Every immigrant faces a tragic choice: Stay who you were and stand apart, or morph into something alien to join in.

This country, in its wisdom, offers the immigrant an uncommonly generous deal: be a hyphenated American.

I was born in Cuba. At some unremarked moment, I became a Cuban-American. That means, roughly, a U.S. citizen with access to really good food and really loud conversations. I could feel proud of the people I came from and still love the country I have grown old in.

My parents were scrupulously law-abiding, and made sure I was a legal immigrant. Back then, all the immigrants I knew had entered this country legally—many of them, like my family, had escaped Communist oppression. Dreamers and desperadoes have always snuck across the border, but the numbers were rarely significant, and many of them were arrested and sent back to their country of origin. Deportation wasn’t a display of bigotry. It was the law. If you wanted a share of American freedom and prosperity, you had to play by the process. Barack Obama, apostle of hope and change, deported over 3 million illegal migrants—more than any president before or since. That was his duty: to enforce federal law.

So, I watched the videos of the Los Angeles immigration riots in a state of utter perplexity. Who were those angry, violent people? Were they really illegal migrants who wished to stay in the United States? In that case, why did they wave the flags of the countries to which they were apparently desperate never to return? Why didn’t they say, “I will abide by whatever rules you wish, so long as you give me a chance to live here”? Or, as many conservatives insist, were the riots the work of organized leftist groups?

How did a 33-year-old Democratic Socialist who wants to institute government-run grocery stores beat the former state governor to win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City?

It’s an astonishing political story—and one potentially with enormous consequences for New York City and the Democratic Party. Will Andrew Cuomo, who conceded the race lat…

It’s Wednesday, June 25. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: World War III didn’t happen. A threat to the constitutional right to hunt?

But first: New York City Democrats choose socialist Zohran Mamdani for mayor.

I first heard the name Zohran Mamdani from my colleague, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold. It was late March, and she thought this 33-year-old long-shot mayoral candidate was worth writing about.

In her first story, I learned that his proposals include government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and free buses. Mamdani’s housing plan alone would cost $100 billion—only slightly less than the entire size of this year’s city budget.

Then there are Mamdani’s views on the police (“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” he posted on X in 2020); Israel (“apartheid”); Benjamin Netanyahu (“As Mayor I would have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York”); and Islamist radicalism (he refuses to condemn the phrase globalize the intifada).

So how did Zohran Mamdani do it? How did this socialist beat Andrew Cuomo, the former governor, to win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City?

It’s an astonishing political story—one with enormous consequences for the city and the Democratic Party. Olivia spent yesterday in the 100-degree heat reporting it out. And that’s today’s lead story.

Olivia spent the evening at what was supposed to be Cuomo’s victory party, speaking to his donors and supporters as the results trickled in. By the end of the night, Cuomo had given a concession speech.

To see it yourself, watch the video report she put together:

Olivia will also be hosting a Free Press livestream today at 11 a.m. with senior editor Will Rahn to break down the vote and tell you everything you need to know about the man who may be New York City’s next mayor. Watch here or on our homepage.

This livestream is available to paying subscribers only. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please click below to become one.

—Bari

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• Donald Trump landed in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a meeting with NATO leaders. The group is expected to agree to increase NATO’s defense spending requirements to 5 percent of its GDP—a significant boost from the current 2 percent target that many member countries already fail to meet. Ahead of the meeting, Trump published messages from NATO secretary-general and former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte. “It was not easy but we’ve got them all signed onto 5 percent!” Rutte wrote. “Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.”

• On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can resume deporting foreigners to “third countries” with which they have no previous ties, lifting a district court injunction. The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices dissented, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said the majority was “rewarding lawlessness.”

• China has unveiled a mosquito-size drone built for military and civilian use, with flapping wings and spindly legs for stealth landings. Developed by a university, the tiny device is barely the size of a human fingernail and is part of a wider push by Beijing for high-tech micro weapons.

• U.S. officials have warned that Iran may retaliate for the recent bombing of its nuclear sites with cyberattacks designed to cause lasting damage or significant psychological impact. “Low-level cyberattacks against U.S. networks by pro-Iranian hacktivists are likely, and cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian government may conduct attacks against U.S. networks,” the Department of Homeland Security warned Sunday.

• Nearly two million student loan borrowers are at risk of docked pay this summer as defaults surge post-pandemic. More than six million federal borrowers are more than 90 days overdue, according to TransUnion. The Education Department is restarting collections after a pandemic-era freeze.

• Harvard is weighing a potential truce with the Trump administration after months of legal battles—but fears any deal might look like appeasement. America’s oldest and wealthiest university took a stand against the administration earlier this year, lost billions of dollars in funding, and is now in a protracted legal battle over its ability to enroll foreign students.

• Big banks are scrambling to stay out of GOP crosshairs as Republican-led states crack down on “woke” business practices. JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and others have met with officials in Texas and Oklahoma to defend against the idea that they have boycotted industries such as firearms and fossil fuels.

• Rep. Al Green, a Democrat from Texas, filed articles of impeachment against President Trump, accusing him of abusing presidential powers by launching strikes on Iran without congressional approval. The resolution calls Trump “an authoritarian president” and cites his broader record as a threat to American democracy. More than 125 House Democrats joined with Republicans to block the move.

Suddenly, the music stopped.

The clock had just struck 10:21 p.m. on Tuesday night at the Carpenters Union Building in SoHo. This was supposed to be a victory party for former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who had long been the leading candidate in the Democratic race for New York City mayor. Three blondes, each with a Modelo beer in their hands, blinked at a giant screen while it flashed the chyron: “ZOHRAN MAMDANI HOLDS LEAD OVER ANDREW CUOMO.”

“Well, fuck,” one woman muttered, before taking a swig of beer.

“Maybe I’m at the wrong watch party,” another woman laughed, saying that she used to work for Cuomo but that everyone she knows was in Queens, drinking to Mamdani’s triumph.

She was stuck at something closer to a wake as Cuomo shuffled to the podium with a stiff grin, saddled by his daughters, who couldn’t conceal the truth. Their eyes were wet with tears at the shock that Cuomo, the scion of a political dynasty, was being trounced by a socialist half his age who had been polling at 1 percent in February.

“Tonight was not our night,” Cuomo said, conceding the primary. “Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night.”

It sure was.

How did a 33-year-old socialist who wants to institute government-run grocery stores beat the former state governor to win the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City?

It’s an astonishing political story—and one with enormous consequences for New York City and the Democratic Party. Will Andrew Cuomo, who conceded the race late last night, run against Zohran Mamdani as an independent? And, if so, will he split the independent vote with Eric Adams. . . and throw the race to Mamdani?

No one has covered this story like our Olivia Reingold. Join her and senior editor Will Rahn Wednesday at 11 a.m. as they break down the vote and tell you everything you need to know about the man who might be New York City’s next mayor. Bring all of your questions.

Again, this will livestream Wednesday, June 25, at 11 a.m. ET. Watch here or on our home page.

This livestream is available to paying subscribers, who will get the chance to ask their questions in a Q/A. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, click below to become one.

Subscribe now

After the video of Sahar Emami, the Iranian news anchor in full chador diving for cover mid-rant as an Israeli bomb struck her studio, the most viral clip of the 12-day war was brought to you by a man who did his damnedest to prevent it: Tucker Carlson.

On his podcast, Carlson responded on air to the first reports of Iranian strikes on the U.S. airbase in Qatar. “Ugh, this is just sad on every level,” he said, placing his hand on his heart. After reading the initial report of the strike from Axios, Carlson said he was praying for America and “I hope that people who have audiences will be responsible, will remember that, like, life is short, you’re going to have to give an account.”

Leaving aside the hereafter, Carlson might consider some accounting in the here and now. In the run-up to the war, Carlson predicted nothing short of World War III if Israel or America attacked Iran. He laid that out in a June 5 X post attacking Fox News host Mark Levin after Levin met with the president. “A war with Iran would amount to a profound betrayal of [Trump’s] supporters. It would end his presidency,” Carlson assured his 16 million followers on X. “The first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy, as surging oil prices trigger unmanageable inflation. Consider the effects of $30 gasoline,” he predicted.

Almost every news story about Fred Smith, who died Saturday at the age of 80, began the same way. His idea for the taut, nimble delivery operation that eventually became FedEx was hatched in an economics paper that he wrote as a Yale University undergraduate student. He got a C. Seven years after his graduation, in 1973, his new company’s airplanes lifted off one night from Memphis, Tennessee, carrying a total of 186 packages.

I never heard Smith grumble about the supposed significance or meaning often attached to that C, even though his grade wasn’t mentioned in FedEx’s announcement of his death. To him, that detail simply vanished from sight—like a speck on the ground from a plane window—at some point while he was building a company that now moves more than 17 million shipments per day, connects about 220 countries and territories, and has more than 500,000 employees.

Now that we can buy anything we want and get it delivered whenever we want, it’s easy to take for granted what it took to turn FedEx into a household name. The company’s advertising slogan—“When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight”—sounded revolutionary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And it was. To deliver on that slogan, Smith had to steer through a thicket of regulations around the world that made it harder to shape FedEx’s route system and operations in alignment with growing delivery demand.

Smith wasn’t just the founder and CEO of a company that moved things. He was also the personification of the reliability that became synonymous with the word FedEx.

Deregulation and looser aviation agreements between countries gradually opened up the roads and skies, and Smith expanded FedEx’s hub-and-spoke network around the world. Having overseen one revolutionary change, Smith adapted to another. When the internet began to threaten the highly profitable business of “FedExing” documents by air, Smith went into ground shipping. That put him into more direct competition with United Parcel Service (UPS) and the United States Postal Service but toughened up FedEx for the rise of Amazon.

In January 2016, about 10 months before he would be elected to his first presidential term, I went to see Donald Trump speak at a firearms trade show in Las Vegas. I was with several of my hunting buddies, and we were all thunderstruck—happily so—to hear Trump tell the crowd that he wouldn’t sell off our public lands. I get goosebumps just thinking about the wonder of living in a nation where anyone, rich or poor, has access to such a beautiful diversity of landscapes and a stunningly rich array of natural resources. To get my support, a politician needs to support public lands.

We have 640 million acres of federally managed public land in the U.S. Sixty-eight percent of that land is administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, mostly in the West. These lands are used for an enormous variety of purposes: timber harvesting, mineral and fossil-fuel extraction, livestock grazing, hunting, fishing, hiking, off-road driving, filmmaking, and even the Burning Man festival, which is held on public land in Nevada.

My surprise about Trump’s vocal commitment to protect these lands from sale was twofold. First, I was surprised that a commercial real estate developer who lived in a Manhattan skyscraper would have any awareness of public lands issues, which tend to be more of a Western concern. Second, and more surprising, was that an up-and-coming Republican candidate would risk alienating the faction of his party that is openly hostile to the idea of the government owning large tracts of undeveloped land.

There’s reason to believe that Trump was earnest. No major sales of public land occurred during his first term, despite multiple efforts in Congress aimed at selling off large tracts of federal property. Now, in the early stage of Trump’s second term, advocates like me are anxious to see whether he is still committed to protecting public lands. On Monday, the Trump administration moved to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which has restricted road construction and timber harvest on almost 59 million acres of U.S. forests. Brooke Rollins, the secretary of agriculture, said that the rule was “an absurd obstacle to common-sense management of our natural resources.” With the rule gone, companies will be able to cut roads through federally managed forests, primarily to cut timber.

I oppose the administration’s move, because the Roadless Rule has successfully helped protect our last vestiges of wilderness. But logging and sell-offs are not the same thing. National forest lands harvested by loggers will eventually grow new trees, which in turn will produce a diversity of wildlife habitats. And, most importantly, such lands remain in public trust for use by future generations. Lands that are sold off will get developed or industrialized—and will no longer be accessible to the American public. In other words, logging is a valid debate. Sell-offs are existentially wrong.

Years ago, I found myself drinking single-malt Scotch with a small group of raptor enthusiasts on a remote island off the coast of Maine. One of them had been Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s roommate at boarding school. He had stories to tell: I’d rather not get sued, but I can report that the two bonded over a shared obsession with falcons.

Falconry wasn’t on most Americans’ radar until RFK Jr. was elevated to the rank of secretary of Health and Human Services; around the time of his appointment, it was gleefully reported that he was a longtime falconer. This, along with the fact that he keeps ravens as pets and was once (wrongly) said to have decapitated a whale carcass with a chainsaw, became shorthand for: This guy’s a weirdo.

I can’t comment on the peculiarity of RFK Jr., but I can defend the reputation of falconry. This past spring, I joined a couple hundred falconers about a dozen miles from downtown Boise, Idaho. We gathered at The Archives of Falconry, a low-slung building perched on a hill with a commanding view of the valley and the snowcapped mountains beyond.

You could also see the somewhat bleak, treeless new housing developments crawling out from the city’s outskirts.

We were all there for the annual gathering of falconers organized by the Archives. We call it a “rendezvous,” a nod to the Old West and its annual meetups of trappers, hunters, and traders who exchanged furs and pelts for supplies and companionship after a lonely year in the wilderness. The rendezvous’s centerpiece is a moving outdoor ceremony where people stand up and reminisce about falconers who died that year and whose names have been added to the Wall of Remembrance.

This year almost 250 falconers showed up, filling a Boise hotel with mostly older white men between the ages of 60 and 90. They’re easy to spot: dusty hiking boots, blue jeans, zippered fleece over a T-shirt. Their caps advertise falconry clubs, farm stores, factories, suppliers of hawk food. Many have known each other for decades, so there is a lot of backslapping and awkward man-hugging. A handful of women falconers also came; more women are involved in falconry now than ever, but they still only make up about 30 percent of the 3,000 American falconers.

Once I would have said that most falconers leaned Libertarian, or Republican. But this year, there was a noticeable shift in tone. Much of the conversation revolved around rumors that the Trump administration would allow public lands to be sold off, opening them up to development and extractive industries. The rollback of environmental protections could have a devastating effect on wildlife, people said—and therefore on their sport.