The Free Press

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President Donald Trump demanded in March 2017, barely two months into his first administration. Trump was just given the unwelcome news that his attorney general had recused himself from the Justice Department investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, and he needed someone to rescue him.

The plaintive cry—later adopted by director Matt Tyrnauer as the title for his revelatory 2019 documentary about Cohn—spoke to the singular importance that the late lawyer and political fixer held in Trump’s life. Like many powerful men of dubious morality, Trump had relied on Cohn to extricate him from messes of his own making. During his heyday as a real-estate tycoon, Trump kept a framed photograph of Cohn in his office; during contentious meetings, he would point to it and ask—not so much as a question but as a threat—“Would you rather deal with him?”

There has never been, nor will there ever be, anyone like Roy Cohn. Who else could work as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s henchman and rent a cottage on the Provincetown property of Norman Mailer? Who else would allow for the filming of a pornographic movie in his Upper East Side town house and count the archbishop of New York as one of his closest acquaintances? Who else could sit for the avant-garde photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (whose homoerotic images set off a national firestorm over public funding of the arts) and call upon William F. Buckley Jr. as a character witness at his disbarment hearing?

Roy Cohn, that’s who. Notorious is the word most often used to describe Cohn, so much so that an image of his face ought to sit adjacent to it in the dictionary. It was a face, write Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark in American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, that “possessed the kind of ugliness that made you take a second look.” Behind the droopy eyelids and misshapen nose—ravined by a scar resulting from a botched childhood surgery—resided an even uglier soul.

It’s Wednesday, September 2. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Rep. Tom Suozzi on how the DSA could set Democrats back a decade. Alex Berenson on the escalating fight over measles in Pennsylvania. Rod Dreher on why conservatives loved the left-leaning poet Wendell Berry. And much more.

But first: The latest on the fight in Iran—and the Pentagon.

The Iran war—locked in a stalemate for almost all of August—is heating up this week after the U.S. launched new strikes on Iran over the weekend, and again on Tuesday. Oil prices are up and global markets are on edge as Scott Bessent threatens sanctions on countries doing business with Tehran. Meanwhile, on the home front, another fight is escalating inside the Pentagon.

The latest fissure: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll personally tendered his resignation to Donald Trump on Monday following ongoing clashes with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Though the reasoning behind Driscoll’s resignation isn’t publicly known, one Trump official told Eli Lake that the heart of the feud is the Pentagon’s promotion process: Driscoll was trying to preserve it as a meritocracy while Hegseth purged or sidelined senior officers without explanation, instead favoring political allies.

To the Hegseth camp, the purges are necessary to push wokeness out of the military. But in practice, Eli reports, it looks like something else.

Today, Eli probes the divides inside the Pentagon and what it means for the Department of Defense to lose so many leaders while it prosecutes a war against Iran.

—The Editors

• Bank of America vice president Erin Piacenti, 32, of New Jersey, was identified as the woman killed in Monday’s Times Square stabbing. Pamela Cisneros, the 49-year-old attacker who was fatally shot by police, had a history of interactions with police during prior mental health episodes, according to her brother.

• An anonymous federal whistleblower warned on Tuesday that the system U.S. Postal Service (USPS) built to carry out Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting risks a “catastrophic failure” that could “derail the midterm elections.” In response, Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal wrote to the postmaster general: “We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

• A Utah judge ruled on Tuesday that 23-year-old Tyler Robinson can be tried for murder in the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. After the ruling, Robinson pleaded not guilty to all charges. He could face the death penalty. Kirk, 31, was shot dead last September during a rally held at Utah Valley University.

• Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 2,100 arrests across New York last month as part of “Operation Rotten Apple,” Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin announced Tuesday. Mullin criticized sanctuary policies enacted by New York governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, claiming they made it harder to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown.

• Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian migrant, died by suicide Monday after walking into traffic in Springfield, Ohio, his family said. Bel had been upset after being forced to wear an ICE ankle monitor following the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

• Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, was convicted Monday of first-degree murder in the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur. The jury deliberations took fewer than three hours. Davis, who faces a life sentence, has indicated his plan to appeal.

• Nicki Minaj will join a panel of judges, including Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and investor Grant Cardone, at the Small Business Administration’s “Million Dollar Pitch Competition” on September 18 in Washington. Five small businesses will compete for a share of $1 million in prize money in a Shark Tank–like competition.

When I woke up to the news that the writer Wendell Berry had died at 92, my mind turned to a conversation I had back in 2007 on his Kentucky farm with his wife, Tanya. I was part of a small group of young conservative writers who made the pilgrimage to meet the great man.

“Wendell doesn’t understand why so many of you conservatives love him,” she told me. “We’re just a couple of old New Deal Democrats.”

“Well,” I said, “there are different kinds of conservatives. Your husband is our kind.”

And then I told her about my book Crunchy Cons, which had been out for a year, and in which Wendell Berry appears, quoted approvingly. Most of us are Christians, I said, and believe in what you might call a sacramental vision of life—and this doesn’t sit comfortably with either the modern Democrats or modern Republicans, who are devoted in their different ways to material progress, and tearing down any barriers to individual self-expression.

Tanya was polite, but I don’t think she got it. That was fine. Most of our conservative friends didn’t, either. They thought of us as crypto-liberals.

The fact is, Wendell Berry really was a small-c conservative, in that he cherished the old, human decencies, and fought like a dungareed Don Quixote, tilting with his writer’s pen against the modern world and its mechanical ways. He was no fool; Berry knew he was waging a losing war. But he fought it anyway, with the conviction of an Old Testament prophet.

When Dan Driscoll announced his resignation as secretary of the Army on Monday, the Pentagon lost one of its few remaining grown-ups. At least, that is the view of military and congressional insiders who spoke to me about his departure.

While his ostensible boss, Pete Hegseth, has managed the nation’s military like a summer camp bully (firing generals and hosting push-up contests), Driscoll was perceived by many in Congress and the White House as a quiet check on the erratic moves of the secretary of defense. And at a moment when the U.S. is relaunching strikes against Iran, Driscoll’s role was as important as ever.

“Dan was trying to protect the integrity of the promotion process,” one administration official who works on military affairs told me. “Dan was not a wokester. He campaigned for Trump. But he also believed in the institution and was trying to keep the front office from meddling in the merit-based promotion process.”

Driscoll tried his best to shield that process from the defense secretary’s whims. Early on, Hegseth unilaterally removed officers from promotion lists generated by the senior ranks of their services. But in recent months, Hegseth has conducted a purge of sorts. The highest-profile example was Hegseth’s sudden termination in April of General Randy George, the Army chief of staff. That same month, John Phelan, the secretary of the Navy, was pushed out of his post by Hegseth. In June, Hegseth maneuvered to cut short the term of General Chris Donahue, who was serving as commander for the U.S. Army in Europe and Africa. Donahue had a legendary reputation as a special operations officer and his dismissal was viewed in Congress as “a slap in the face,” one Senate Republican staffer told me.

Representative Tom Suozzi represents New York’s Third Congressional District, which stretches from northeastern Queens in New York City to a vast swath of suburban Long Island. He’s been an uncompromising critic of his party’s far-left flank, authoring the “Promise to America” earlier this year, with a number of other Democrats, to rebuke socialism and reaffirm what he believes are his party’s core principles. Today, he offers a stark warning to his fellow Democrats on what happens “when a determined ideological movement catches a party divided, complacent, or unprepared.” We hope you read the whole thing. —Will Rahn

Millions of Americans are losing faith in their government, their institutions, and an economic system that no longer seems to reward hard work. They struggle to afford housing, healthcare, and education while watching wealth become increasingly concentrated at the top. They’re mad as hell, in other words, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

But if Democrats are going to earn the confidence of these Americans this November and beyond, the answer will not be found in the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) platform. Although relatively small in number—the organization counts 120,000 members in a country of some 330 million people—the DSA is aggressive and disciplined. Candidates affiliated with the group are winning Democratic primaries. But we cannot allow them to drag our party to the far left.

Modern political history offers two stark warnings about what can happen when a determined ideological movement catches a party divided, complacent, or unprepared. We’ll start with the Republicans.

In 1964, GOP leaders badly underestimated Barry Goldwater, a fiercely right-wing Arizona senator. Many considered his views too conservative and his appeal too narrow. But Goldwater’s supporters were better organized and understood that party contests can be won by mobilizing passionate voters while the broader electorate remains divided or disengaged.

For a week, the federal government and the state of Pennsylvania have been embroiled in a fight over whether a measles outbreak killed two state residents, leading to countless articles asking, among other questions, if a mother’s measles can cause a fatal lacerated spleen in an infant (the answer: unlikely).

Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is insisting on reviewing the two cases before it agrees the deaths were measles-related, provoking a new round of questions about whether the CDC should be second-guessing the state’s report (the answer: yes).

Yet nobody has asked the most crucial question of all: Why did the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, hold a press conference to announce these deaths?

To put it another way: Why is every measles death now national news? Using a press conference to alert a population of a measles outbreak makes sense. Residents should know if they’ve been exposed, especially if they’re unvaccinated.

Announcing individual measles deaths is pure political and public health theater.

No one with keen senses needs to be reminded that the West is still very much at war with radical Islam. As the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, approaches, U.S. and Israeli armed forces continue to tangle each day with kindred spirits of the ideologues who struck New York and Virginia, while European capitals suffer frequent attacks from radicals within their walls.

Yet there is another war still being waged, one over the origin and meaning of the 9/11 attacks. Lies and conspiracy theories about the events have gained new prominence in recent years, including those proffered by the right, the left, and the Islamic extremists themselves. And a new generation of adults has come of age, many of whom are politically misguided, and all of whom are too young to recall the attacks firsthand. For their sake, and to keep our society morally anchored, those who remember 9/11 must refute the conspiracies and state the truth about the attacks clearly and loudly.

Tucker Carlson recently attempted to raise the curtain on what promises to be a season of distortions. He interviewed former congressman Curt Weldon, who has repeated the popular but debunked claim that Building 7 of the World Trade Center was demolished by the U.S. government in a controlled demolition on the day of the attacks. During the podcast, Weldon claimed that the conspiracy went much further than that. “The real story is, Tucker, did America plan it? And did America just initially come up with the operation through a handful of people, an operation that would kill 10,000 innocent Americans?”

This trend of false theories didn’t begin immediately after the 2001 attacks. It took a while for the sinister and idiotic industry to get going. At first, those opposed to American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq kept their insinuations vague.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where Jews who want to leave are gaining more support from Americans, the reality of the Canada-U.S. trade war sounds like a reality show, and the September 11 terrorist attacks are not “terrorist attacks.” Let’s jump in!

More than 10,000 people from South Africa have entered the United States as refugees since President Donald Trump opened the country to Afrikaners who “are victims of unjust racial discrimination,” as he put it last year. Pressure is now growing for the president to do the same thing for Jewish Canadians.

A group of American lawmakers, faith leaders, and conservative activists asked Trump in a letter in August to “establish an appropriate, lawful immigration and humanitarian pathway for Jewish Canadians who are experiencing persecution or who credibly fear for their safety because they are Jewish.”

The letter cited the widely documented surge in antisemitism in Canada, including 27 violent antisemitic incidents between the start of this year and mid-July, compared with 10 during all of 2025, according to B’nai Brith Canada. As I reported in June, Jews account for roughly 1 percent of Canada’s population, but are “69 percent of all hate crimes reported by police in 2024 that were motivated by religion. Jews were the targets of more hate crimes than all other religious groups combined.”

It’s Tuesday, September 1. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: A dispatch from a Free Press Supper Club. Arthur Brooks on why the Baby Boomers won’t grow up. An Air Force general’s lessons about leadership and our next war. And much more.

But first: Suzy Weiss on John Galliano, Anna Wintour, and the Met Gala disaster.

John Galliano has been pumping out fanciful garb, favored by the A-listers who swan red carpets, for over four decades. His designs, figure-hugging gowns with dramatic proportions in sumptuous fabrics, are unmistakable—and beautiful. Still, it was a shock when the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced that it would dedicate its yearly exhibit, and the accompanying gala, which is chaired by Anna Wintour, to the British designer.

It was shocking because 15 years ago, Galliano went on a series of drunken antisemitic tirades at a café, telling two women, “Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed,” and “Dirty Jewish face, you should be dead.” He was fired from Dior but made his return to the industry a few years later.

On Monday, after an outcry following the announcement, Galliano and Wintour called off the exhibit. “I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” Galliano wrote in a statement. Wintour called the move “courageous.” Yet the outcome is even worse than the original decision to honor Galliano with a lifetime retrospective. Read my piece to find out why the show ought to go on.

—Suzy Weiss

Last month, thousands of Free Pressers sat down for dinner together. One of them was Andy Brehm, a columnist for The Minnesota Star Tribune, who met four strangers with different jobs, different lives, and different politics. They inspired Andy so much that he wrote an article about his evening. We were so touched by Andy’s piece, and want to share it with you today:

And if you have FOMO after reading his column, fear not! Tickets for our next supper club, on September 17, are now on sale. Join us in more than 50 cities worldwide for a delicious meal, great conversation and, as Andy writes—“something I had nearly forgotten existed in modern American life: genuine curiosity and civility.”

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• The Army’s top civilian leader, Daniel P. Driscoll, handed in his resignation to President Trump on Monday, according to administration officials. The Army secretary, who often found himself at odds with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was a rarity among Pentagon officials in his willingness to work with lawmakers from both parties, two congressional aides told The New York Times.

• Argentine football legend Lionel Messi confirmed his retirement from international soccer in an Instagram post Monday, saying the decision “hurts deep in my soul.” The 39-year-old Messi played in his sixth and final World Cup this summer, where Argentina lost in the final round to Spain.

• A woman stabbed two people in Times Square on Monday—one of them fatally—before police shot her dead. Police repeatedly attempted to convince the woman, 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros, to disarm before using lethal force, according to New York City police commissioner Jessica Tisch. Cisneros reportedly responded: “I’m not dropping anything. I would rather kill both of you.”

• President Trump redoubled his threats against Iran, suggesting that Kharg Island, a major oil hub, could be targeted. The warning followed a slew of ballistic missile strikes from Iran over the weekend aimed at American military bases in the region. Most of the strikes were intercepted by air-defense systems.

• A flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend killed at least two people and left one person missing, authorities said Monday. About 80 people were rescued from the flooded area.

• The Supreme Court said Monday it will allow Trump to continue building a new White House ballroom, denying the claims of the historic preservation group that said it was harmed by the project. The new construction, which the Trump administration said is 65 percent complete, will be larger than the White House mansion and West Wing combined.

• The prediction market Kalshi said Monday that it has permanently banned former GOP congressman George Santos from its platform after he allegedly bet on his own attendance at President Trump’s State of the Union address earlier this year. “Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform,” Santos said on X. “Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.”

The story of Air Force General David Goldfein, who miraculously survived after his plane was shot down over Serbia in 1999, has since become military legend. Today, he joins School of War to recount the harrowing rescue mission that saved him, how he stayed alive behind enemy lines, and the lessons his remarkable career offers about leadership, airpower…