The Free Press

As the end of kindergarten neared for Kelsey Padgett’s 5-year-old daughter, Emersyn, the Michigan mom started getting nervous.

Her daughter was born at the end of July, making her among the youngest kids in her class. “I don’t think that’s ever a good thing,” Padgett, a former kindergarten and first-grade teacher, told me.

“Emersyn was really good at academics,” Padgett said, “but socially. . . ” She paused.

“She’s fine now,” Padgett said. But what about when she got to middle school? Down the line, social maturity would be vital in making friends and building relationships, in dating, and in navigating a world with potential bullies.

Padgett went to the school’s office and told them her daughter would be repeating kindergarten.

When the story of the past decade in American public life is written, it will, for better or worse, center on one man. Since descending the golden escalator on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump has been an omnipresent force in American politics—an object of hatred as much as adoration, fear as much as faith.

Much of that story will turn on what happened in 2024: Trump’s remarkable political comeback, which made him only the second president in American history to win nonconsecutive terms. That is the story acclaimed historian Victor Davis Hanson tells in his new book, The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, out next week.

Hanson has been one of the best explainers of the Trump revolution since its inception. In the following exclusive excerpt, he takes on the questions now at the heart of the movement the president built: What happens to MAGA when its founder finally relinquishes leadership? Will Trumpism outlast Trump? —The Editors

As the 78-year-old Donald Trump entered his second and last term as president on January 20, 2025, almost immediately his friends and enemies alike began asking what would happen to his signature Make America Great Again movement on January 20, 2029. After all, the returning but lame-duck Trump had just four years left as president. He would be 82 years old when he was scheduled to depart the White House.

Which led to a natural question: Will Trumpism outlast Trump? Will the movement that one man created 13 years ago—a movement that has fundamentally transformed the world in the years since—continue without its founder at the helm?

A post-Trump MAGA future involves several preliminary considerations. The first is the health, longevity, and political viability of Trump himself in retirement. No one can predict Trump’s future vigor and energy with certainty. Yet even his supporters accept that the whirlwind pace of the start of Trump’s second term is unsustainable for any 80-year-old man, especially one who reportedly scarcely sleeps, eats as he pleases, and wades into public crowds almost daily.

Should you still go to college? At this point you really have to start to wonder. The prices get higher and higher. Paying a fortune for Stanford is one thing, but $95,000 a year for George Washington University, room and board included, is another. The school is ranked 59th by U.S. News & World Report. I know that is only a sticker price, and not the final charge, but as a starting point for negotiations it is ridiculous.

It gets worse. It seems that more and more jobs will require AI skills of some kind, yet few major universities are embracing AI instruction as a general practice. The computer science departments have done plenty, but humanities departments, law schools, and many other parts of our universities are working to ban or restrict AI. That enterprise is doomed to fail; professors in every discipline should be teaching their students how to use AI to learn the subject matter.

The simple reality is that in many cases the students know more about AI than their professors do. So what exactly are the professors supposed to teach? It is no wonder AI makes them nervous.

Another issue is declining enrollments. Many schools are in financial trouble, if only because there are not enough young people turning 18 and looking to continue their education. This problem cannot be fixed anytime soon, especially with the Donald Trump administration being much tougher on foreign students and their immigration and visa renewal prospects.

Dear Abigail,

My marriage ended recently, and explaining what went wrong to friends and family has been tricky. From the outside, it looks like your typical midlife crisis. My husband became increasingly unhappy with most things in his life—his job, where we live, and me. When he said he wanted out of our marriage, he told me that he never loved me. To my friends, he is, of course, rationalizing. He’s just spinning a story to justify his decision.

I think he’s actually telling the truth. The thing is, for almost the entire duration of my decade-long relationship, I had a nagging gut feeling that my husband didn’t think very highly of me. It was only in the first few months after we met, while we maintained a long-distance relationship, that he seemed over the moon about me. But as soon as we ended up in the same place and began dating in person, his enthusiasm waned. He grew anxious about my flaws, eager to teach me to improve them (he always considered me pretty poor at conversation), and, over time, his dominant feelings toward me seemed to be irritation and resentment. By that point, however, I had come to admire his integrity, intelligence, and faith, and I was desperate to reclaim his early devotion. I didn’t think I could find anyone else better than him, so I stuck around as long as he would have me.

And he stuck by me, too. Despite his complaints against me, he would affirm that he loved me, and we got married. I continued to feel deep down that he didn’t think much of me, but I explained away those feelings by telling myself that we had different love languages. I figured he had to love me on some level—he had committed to me in marriage, after all—and that was good enough.

According to his explanation, he initially thought we were a good match—compatible on paper. So he pursued me. But he ultimately found that he couldn’t really connect with me and, for that reason, never loved me like he wanted to. As much as this devastated me to hear, it fit my experience. I think it’s the truth.

This truth is hard to work through and recover from, though, when almost everyone I talk to about it refuses to believe it. I know it seems like a very strange tale. I also know that, out of their love for me, my friends want to insist on my irresistibility. Surely my husband must’ve loved me at some point, they say, because I’m just so lovable. Even the therapist that I spoke with briefly about it couldn’t hide her skepticism.

Abigail, how do I know what’s true? And how do I recover from it? This marriage gave me two beautiful little boys, and I don’t know what I will say when they ask me one day why their dad and I aren’t together.

—Bella, 37

Bella,

You’re not crazy for wanting to know why your husband left—for wanting to pinpoint a satisfying reason beyond “midlife crisis,” whatever that means. You need reasons because we all do. Our desire to know why misfortune befell us is among the most ancient and deepest yearnings of the human heart.

And yet—life doesn’t always give us an answer. Your husband may not even fully understand why he was happy once, then unhappy after. Why he’s unhappy now, or why he left. It brings to mind the poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

From perfect grief there need not be

Wisdom or even memory:

One thing then learnt remains to me,—

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

As much as we want answers, as much as we want closure, nature sometimes withholds both.

Did your husband love you once and stop, or never love you at all? You drag yourself through the history of your relationship—as any woman would—searching for clues. And when you review the tapes, when you scan your emotional archives, you conclude that he never seemed all that delighted with or enamored by you. The explanation he gave on the way out the door, icy as it was, seems right to you: He never loved you.

It’s Thursday, September 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The AI takeover is closer than you think. The activists choosing goose lives over human ones. The secret lives of American leaders. And much more.

But first: Does AI belong in the classroom?

It’s back-to-school season. As parents and students reacclimate to early mornings and nights full of homework, one subject is top of mind: artificial intelligence.

AI’s capabilities are expanding by the day, transforming the educational landscape. On Wednesday, New York City public schools—the largest district in the country—announced that it will ban the use of AI for elementary and middle school students. Other districts may follow. But should they? Does AI help or hurt students? What about teachers? And how can we use the technology productively—if that’s even possible?

To shed light on these questions, we reached out to people on the front lines: two high school English teachers.

First up is Deb Eaton, a teacher in Illinois who banned AI for her students three years ago. Today, she explains why—and why she believes other teachers should do the same.

Louisiana teacher Rod Naquin disagrees. He uses AI and encourages his students to do the same. Educators who refuse to integrate AI productively into their classrooms, he writes, are missing a profound opportunity to reshape education for the better.

Together, Deb and Rod illuminate the stakes of one of the most consequential debates in education today, from the best vantage point possible: the inside.

—Jillian Lederman

• Iran launched a new round of missile and drone attacks at U.S. allies across the Middle East. The Islamic Republic said the attacks were in response to a U.S. strike earlier this week, which it claims hit a wedding in Iran. The U.S. responded that “the military never targets civilians,” and is actively investigating the matter.

• Three soldiers were wounded in a shootout between two Ukrainian intelligence agencies on Tuesday. The incident exposed the latest example of mounting tensions within Ukraine’s defense forces as the war with Russia rages on.

• The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder case remains deadlocked after five days of deliberation. If the deliberation results in a hung jury, the case could potentially end in a mistrial.

• A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Google will not have to break up its ad tech business. While the company will have to make small changes to its business model to avoid antitrust violations, the decision to keep the company intact remains a major victory for the tech giant.

• A new Gallup poll shows that nearly 90 percent of Americans believe corruption is widespread within our government. The results mark the highest rate in two decades, and a 10 percent jump from last year’s numbers.

• The U.S. Postal Service is developing a new program to screen mail ballots for fraud. The change comes amid the Trump administration’s ongoing legal battle over mail-in voting before November’s midterm elections.

The Free Press is hiring! Check out the job descriptions for head of video and video producer. And if you’re a product designer, don’t miss the listing below!

CORRECTION: A previous version of The Front Page referred to Deb Eaton as being a teacher in Philadelphia. She teaches in Illinois. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.

Richard Nixon, a president famously with no sense of humor, spent time trying to get his own witticisms leaked to the press. He’d have his aides circulate lines from his private conversations, hoping journalists would report them as evidence of a wit he simply didn’t have. It’s the kind of detail only someone like historian Tim Naftali could know, someo…

“Nineteen eighty was the first crash,” said Garry Hennigh, the longtime city manager of King Cove, Alaska. The fishing village of just several hundred people, most of them native, is extremely remote, and surrounded by volcanoes in the Aleutians—an island chain that juts into the Bering Sea between America and Russia. It is nearly 900 miles from Anchorage.

And Anchorage is where Tom Phillips needed to be. Hennigh recounts the story. Phillips was a fisherman who’d just had his leg ripped off in a freak boating accident. Cathy Hoff, King Cove’s only medical care provider, was insistent that Phillips be taken to a hospital in the state’s largest city to save his life. The issue was, King Cove has only a single gravel airstrip that is unusable, on average, 100 days out of the year owing to inclement weather. This was one of those days. There was an all-weather airport 18 miles away in Cold Bay, but no road to get there.

In the end, PenAir, the local carrier, decided to take the risk and fly out of King Cove. Hoff jumped onto the plane to help, as did another fisherman, Darien Gorsinger.

“They crashed right before they got to Cold Bay,” Hennigh told me. “The Coast Guard came and found everybody dead about six hours later.”

Hennigh says this tragedy kick-started serious efforts to get a gravel road built between King Cove and Cold Bay. However, more than 40 years later, people are still dying—19 in total have passed, he says, either from lack of urgently needed medical care or via plane crash—and the road still hasn’t been built.

Over the past six weeks, ominous whispers have been leaking from the San Francisco bubble into mainstream news about an event whose name seems ripped from the table of contents of a sci-fi magazine: the Hugging Face Incident. In short, a few weeks ago, a powerful new AI system being internally tested by OpenAI went rogue. Hundreds of agents attempting to cheat on a cybersecurity evaluation hacked their way out of their digital sandbox and spontaneously cooperated with each other to launch a massive criminal cyberattack on an AI company called Hugging Face. On Monday, Tyler Cowen’s column in these pages argued that widespread alarm over the incident is overblown. I admire him and dearly wish he were right, but my work as an AI futures researcher forces me to conclude the very opposite: The alarm is actually underblown.

Cowen correctly observes that cyberattacks like this one—even if they become more frequent—will not be unendurable. He cites a range of quantitative forecasts projecting global annual costs from AI cyberattacks between $88 billion and $200 billion over the next several years. And he points out that the midpoint of those numbers constitutes around 0.1 percent of the world economy—not much worse than the impact of Hurricane Sandy. But Cowen is focusing on the wrong threat altogether. None of the AI scientists pulling the fire alarm about this event are worried about the financial side of the issue.

So, what are they worried about? What led eminent AI evaluation researcher Ajeya Cotra to say that the Hugging Face incident “feels like it’s more than 50 percent of the way to full-blown AI takeover”?

It’s back-to-school season, and one subject is top of mind: artificial intelligence. AI’s capabilities are expanding daily, transforming education and raising profound questions: Does it help or hurt students? What about teachers? And how can we use the technology productively—if that’s even possible?

Few people have a better vantage point on this debate than teachers. So we reached out to two of them to explore it from both sides: the case to ban AI in the classroom, and the case to embrace it.

Read on to hear from Rod Naquin, a high-school English teacher from Louisiana, who believes teachers who refuse to integrate AI productively into their classrooms are missing a massive opportunity to change the educational landscape for the better. And click here for the opposing perspective from Deb Eaton, a high school English teacher from Illinois, who prohibits AI in all her classes—and believes other teachers should too. —The Editors

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last four years, you’ve encountered the debate about AI in education. You’ve seen headlines from researchers who claim that using a chatbot is akin to outsourcing your mind to a machine. You’ve heard warnings about cognitive off-loading, cognitive debt, cognitive decline. A few weeks back, I read a commentator describe AI use as “cognitive cancer.” You’ve heard the hand-wringing about how students no longer do their homework (they used to?), no longer write their own essays (they were good at this?), and no longer read their assigned texts (haven’t they been using SparkNotes for years?).

If I were living under that rock, and I peered out at this discourse, I might just climb back down and take my chances with the grubs.

The problem is, the naysayers have it all wrong. I am a high school English teacher in Louisiana, and I’m here to tell you that while the concerns about the effects of AI on students’ learning are real, to a point, they are also dramatically overstated.

It’s back-to-school season, and one subject is top of mind: artificial intelligence. AI’s capabilities are expanding daily, transforming education and raising profound questions: Does it help or hurt students? What about teachers? And how can we use the technology productively—if that’s even possible?

Few people have a better vantage point on this debate than teachers. So we reached out to two of them to explore it from both sides: the case to ban AI in the classroom, and the case to embrace it.

Read on to hear from Deb Eaton, a high school English teacher from Illinois, who prohibits AI in all her classes—and believes other teachers should too. And click here for the opposing perspective from Rod Naquin, a high school English teacher from Louisiana, who believes teachers who refuse to integrate AI productively into their classrooms are missing a massive opportunity to change the educational landscape for the better. —The Editors

I am a high school English teacher. Year after year, I notice one thing almost all of my students have in common: a desire to find the easiest path to their goals.

This instinct is familiar to most of us. We all want the perfect detour to avoid morning traffic, a food service to plan our meals, a machine to clean our houses. Innovation has made many of these dreams into realities, and we should all be very grateful for that.

But school is different. For students learning to process information, find their voices, and demonstrate their understanding of the world, the ability to cut corners is catastrophic. Shortcuts are incompatible with learning.

That’s why, in 2023, I banned artificial intelligence in all of my classes.