The Free Press

Hello, and welcome back. I’m still in California, and I’m proud to report I was right all along: It’s heaven, and always will be. I can finally reveal that I’m the soon-to-be buyer of Harry and Meghan’s Montecito estate, and will be moving in promptly. You can refer to me as HRH if it makes you more comfortable. Let’s get to whatever’s happening outside my palace walls.

→ Oh, no: He’s redesigning the ships.

As a person with a wife who has alarmingly strong opinions on curtain tassels: Pete Hegseth, listen to me, do not let Donald J. Trump do a redesign of our navy. You tell him sorry, the floors can’t be recarpeted, it’s the law, and you hustle him to the next room. Do not let the Liberace President gain access to our great nation’s military vessels. Don’t get me wrong, I love that we have a culturally gay president, but I don’t think he needs to bedazzle and gild the guns, too.

Speaking of a gay president, this week we were reminded that he is, in fact, not gay. The sort of old dog element of Donald J. has faded as a storyline in recent years. But then comes the case of Natalie Harp, the executive assistant to the president, who is apparently getting preferential treatment in the White House. Harp is uniquely devoted to POTUS, according to a New York Times profile of her this week. For example: When Trump sneaked out of Air Force One in a catering truck, he left behind the press corps (of course) and Marco Rubio, but he took Natalie Harp with him. And all kinds of implications are being implied. For the best insinuations and gossip that could involve illicit behavior and attractive employees, we turn to Michael Wolff. He claims that Melania won’t go to events if Natalie Harp is there. “Other than at ceremonial occasions, or in a strictly official capacity, she has given up the role of wife. Practically speaking, there is no room for her,” he says. And: “Harp superseded the White House staff and, as well, his wife and family. Nobody got between Harp and Trump. And you only got to Trump by going through Harp.” I, for one, am shocked even to consider that our dear ol’ president could behave as such. And on top of that, Ms. Harp is 35 years old, an unprecedented and honestly alarming age for an affair (Monica Lewinsky, whom I adore, was a much more appropriate 22). There’s precedent for things like this.

Anyway, Natalie Harp may well be just a devoted and great employee who is being secretly smeared by Melania’s dark arts PR team for any number of reasons (never ask why two women are fighting). Or Natalie Harp may be our next First Lady, in which case I will ready my new commemorative First Couple fine bone china. We will track this one closely at TGIF.

But back to the Navy. The sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are apparently furious to have been deployed for so long on an old warship with bad food and moldy showers, which I agree seems horrible. But then again, I didn’t sign up for the Navy. The New York Times sat down with the family members of one of the sailors, whose mother says: “They didn’t sign up to be on a ship in the middle of the ocean.” Gen Z might achieve world peace just by collectively deciding that war is cooked, and the amenities are terrible. Fair enough.

→ Dan Bilzerian is the one I should have been watching: I’ve spent the past few months looking on in horror as former Free Press contributor turned Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback went viral for his campaign, which is based around freeing the people from “goyslop” and calling his black opponent a slave (let’s just say he’s been on a journey since his Free Press days). Turns out, I missed the real story. An honest-to-god, bona fide Nazi, Dan Bilzerian, announced his candidacy to represent Florida’s 6th Congressional District in April, then did very little traditional campaigning, and still won 18.7 percent of the district. Dan’s entire pitch for himself was based around his antisemitism. He called his opponent Randy Fine a “fat Jew” and a “Satanic whore.” He posted things like: “District 6 understands the Jewish problem.” That was his entire message. And he won 18.7 percent of the vote. James Fishback only won 10.5 percent of the vote. That’s right, he was too nuanced for the electorate. The electorate didn’t need his anti-black racism. Why have anything else to say when you can blame it all on Jews? No need to argue about laws or taxes or the pros and cons of this or that when there’s this delightful, ancient scapegoat right in front of you—or, adjacent to you, throwing an over-the-top bar mitzvah in South Beach.

→ The polls are actually fake: An explosive poll last week showed that Karen Bass was beating socialist candidate Nithya Raman by double digits in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. The Los Angeles Times tried to talk to the pollsters. Turns out there were no pollsters, and it was just totally fake! Here’s what they wrote to the Los Angeles Times: “Median Strategies was created as a short term social experiment to examine how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. We are not seeking publicity or attribution for the individuals involved and are declining interviews.”

Turns out they made a fake poll to spread disinformation in an effort to mess with voters’ heads. And they’re calling it “a short term social experiment.” Which seems to be just a sophisticated euphemism for a lie.

In prerevolutionary Russia, it was not uncommon for children to dream of becoming terrorists when they grew up. “It was a respected profession,” says Northwestern University professor Gary Saul Morson, who now sees troubling parallels between modern-day America and an era in Russia when terrorism became fashionable and radicals came to see violence as a…

It’s a banner week for crazy women.

Suzy and Dan dive into the conspiracy theories surrounding Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother on trial for strangling her three children and Real Housewife Lisa Rinna’s therapist-assisted attempt to crack the case.

Then, Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s fiercely devoted aide, managed to turn her longtime obsession wit…

As the great Artificial Intelligence Mania hurtles forward toward its denouement, techno-optimists and AI-doomsters agree that it will have world-altering consequences. The unanswered question is what form this alteration will take. Will it be universal prosperity, or disaster? And if the latter, will it be the historically familiar financial crisis that invariably occurs at the tail end of a febrile investment boom, magnifying the incipient revolt of the public against AI? Or will it be more like science fiction, as one of the frontier models runs amok, best case by emptying all the accounts from a medium-size bank—which might also cause a financial crisis—or worst case by escalating the cyberwar between the superpowers to the point of World War III?

Having written in my last column that history was pretty much dead, this time I’ll go with sci-fi as our guide. Economic history is of course replete with examples of new, world-altering technologies. But from fire to the internet, no previous innovation has had the potential to replace humans altogether.

I’ve written elsewhere that you cannot hope to understand the potential impacts of AI if you don’t read science fiction. I stress the word “read.” Distant memories of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix don’t count. At a minimum, you need to know William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” to understand the full range of imaginable outcomes—from malignant corporate supercomputers to cuddly AIs we raise (or abuse) from infancy.

And you absolutely must read the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.

Banks is long dead, but his estate will have benefited greatly from this summer’s reading recommendation from the world’s richest man. Elon Musk’s interview last month with Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist was a classic for many reasons, but the most illuminating segment was when Musk began to channel Banks, explicitly acknowledging that his ideas about the impact of AI came straight from the novelist.

Dear Abigail,

I grew up as the oldest of two girls in a very rural, generational farming community in the Midwest, where most people never leave as time marches on. I helped my dad with the farm and was very involved in the work, but I recognized that I did not want the stress of irregular earnings. I was the first in my family to go to college, and afterwards, my husband and I both got jobs a couple of hours from our hometown working in corporate fields. At first, his job required a lot of travel, but when our children were very young, he was offered a promotion out of state that allowed him to be home every night. We accepted that transfer for the benefit of our family and have now lived in Texas for over 27 years.

My sister stayed in the area, married, and had two children—a boy and a girl, who are both now married with their own children and live nearby. My nephew has been working as a hired farmhand, while also starting to rent his own farmland.

As our parents were aging, my sister and I encouraged them to ensure their estate was set up as they wanted. My dad’s position was that my sister and I would share everything equally, and since that’s what their wills stated, there was no reason to meet with anyone or change anything.

My dad died unexpectedly in December 2020 at the age of 84. That summer, when I went back to the Midwest for a family wedding, my mom dropped the bomb that she had changed the plans and now my sister would inherit the farm, then her kids would inherit after that. The farm is valued at $7 million. To say I was shocked is an understatement.

Her explanation was that I had moved away, and she didn’t want my nephew to struggle. She said some very hurtful things that I can never forget, about how my family didn’t deserve anything, since we don’t live in the area. I have never asked for nor received a penny from my parents, all the way back to putting myself through college.

In the five years since that conversation, I have continued to call my mom every week. I’ve gone back every year multiple times to see her, and have cared for her during extended periods after major surgery. She acts like everything is the way it was before dad died. I kept thinking that she would wake up to how out of balance she is treating me. That has never happened, and I know she is doing exactly what she wants.

In mid-May, on one of our normal weekly calls, she told me she had signed paperwork to sell the house and outbuildings to my nephew and his wife. I asked why she would sell him something he was going to inherit, and she didn’t have an answer other than that they asked. She sold it for pennies on the dollar and didn’t tell me until everything was finalized. My sister knew what was happening and didn’t tell me in any of the conversations we had during the spring. She has never questioned my mom on any of the estate changes and just continued to say that mom is doing what she wants.

That was my last straw. I told them both I needed a break from them and haven’t talked to either one of them since. I’m done with pretending that we’re a family when this is how I’m treated: as a former neighbor they used to know but don’t really care about anymore. How do I let go of my sadness and anger and get over this?

—Julie, 60

Dear Julie,

In the ’80s, when parents still spanked, kids became quick studies of how to avoid a swatting. And in the home I was raised in, the most surefire way turned out to be this: by sticking up for each other.

“Please, Dad, he didn’t mean to!” That’s usually all it took. My father made sure my brother and I both knew that in his view, standing up for each other was a cardinal virtue—more important to him than meting out justice. Whenever we failed to do this, we would hear about it. “That’s your brother,” my father would say, the words raspy with disappointment. He never even had to say the words that hung in the air: How could you?

But in case we still managed to miss the message, my father also put it to us straight: “That’s who’s going to be there for you when your mother and I are no longer around.”

Julie, your letter is so rich with tragic decisions, wrongdoing, and justifiable anger. So let’s start with the worst of it: your sister.

It’s Thursday, August 20. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Anthropic’s economics chief on the AI jobs apocalypse that isn’t—and when that might change. Vinay Prasad reads Anthony Fauci’s diaries. A Democratic upset in Florida. And much more.

But first: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president?

The political story of the year so far is the rise of the far left: New York City has a socialist mayor; in primaries across the country, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have toppled moderates (scroll down for more on the latest upset); and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has emerged as a (way too) early front-runner in the race for the 2028 presidential election. In fact, according to prediction markets, she is, as of last week, the front-runner.

AOC hasn’t said whether she’ll run, but her emergence as a genuine presidential contender is a sign of the times. Which is why we asked eagle-eyed Washington watcher Mark Halperin to assess her chances. Will she run? Could she win? Read Mark’s analysis to find out.

—Oliver Wiseman

• President Trump announced a delay on his threat of new 50 percent tariffs on Canada. The decision came just 90 minutes before the deadline of Wednesday at 12:01 a.m., and it will likely keep negotiations between the two countries going.

• President Trump said Wednesday that the United States might return to negotiations with Iran “at some point.” Those diplomatic efforts are unlikely to come soon, since the “situation is so good,” according to the president.

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced that it is severing all trade and financial ties with Iran. The UAE’s move came after it accused Iran of launching ballistic missiles toward the UAE, yet another sign of escalating conflict in the region.

• President Trump decided to nominate White House aide Heidi Overton as the next head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Overton appeared next to the president last week when he signed an executive order overhauling the childhood vaccine schedule.

• A new mRNA vaccine showed positive results in a trial for skin cancer patients. While mRNA treatments were highly controversial during the coronavirus pandemic, this study could pave the way for the FDA to approve the first mRNA treatment for cancer.

It takes a certain kind of political nerve to run as a “proud” democratic socialist in South Florida.

A refuge for Cubans and Venezuelans whose families escaped socialist dictatorships, the place isn’t exactly teeming with DSA-curious Democrats, to put it mildly. “To actually pin the title socialist onto your name here, it’s telling me either you’re totally tone deaf, or you’re running to try to make a name for yourself, because the numbers do not warrant having a viable candidacy,” GOP Florida Rep. Alex Rizo told me on Monday, a day before Floridians cast ballots in this year’s Sunshine State primary elections. The region also has a large share of seniors and a sizable Jewish population—groups that tend to be wary of the current crop of anti-Israel socialist candidates.

Rizo and I were discussing the congressional candidacy of union organizer Oliver Larkin, the Democratic Socialists of America member who lost his House primary bid on Tuesday against pro-Israel moderate Rep. Jared Moskowitz by 27 points. The two were vying for the chance to fill a newly drawn South Florida congressional district, and the rout seemed to announce that the socialist wave sweeping primaries nationwide had hit a wall of resistance in Florida.

Yet that notion was dispelled by the surprise star of Tuesday’s Florida primaries. Three-term state representative Angie Nixon, another union organizer and recent DSA convert, came out of nowhere to win the Sunshine State’s Democratic Senate primary. Nixon trounced the establishment-backed Democratic front-runner Alexander Vindman, a retired lieutenant colonel who became famous as a whistleblower during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.

For some time now, the smart money has said that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will pass on a White House run in 2028. Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat will beckon in two years, but the 36-year-old AOC, with a millennial’s ingrained desire for a proper work-life balance, may sit that one out too. It would be understandable, even rational, for her to wait another quadrennial cycle to make her next big move.

But in a Democratic field that lacks a front-runner—a field that might not settle on a favorite until late winter 2028—there is now a useful exercise to game out: What would a successful run for the Democratic nomination look like for this massive political talent?

Add to the mix the updated nomination calendar, the rise of the democratic socialists, the likely lineup of Democratic candidates, and AOC’s own recent professional and personal moves, and voilà—Ocasio-Cortez might have the cleanest and clearest path to the nomination of any Democrat. That’s in no small part because of a twin reality: Even as the super progressive wing of the party is ascendant and powerful, it paradoxically lacks an obvious presidential candidate to carry the banner. Besides AOC, the other two prospects are 84-year-old Bernie Sanders, viewed by most as too old to be a viable candidate, and California’s Ro Khanna, a House member with some appeal and a penchant for making news, but nothing like Ocasio-Cortez’s dazzling charisma and national following.

AOC and Sanders have partnered in a project to take over and reshape the Democratic Party, and while she is clearly the junior partner, Sanders is expected to defer to her if she is willing to run. Sanders could turn much of his movement and the thriving remnants of his presidential campaign operation over to his protégé, leaving her to dominate the progressive lane. That would give AOC an enormous advantage over her more establishment rivals, none of whom have access to a movement and all of whom would then be caught in a traffic pileup of entrenched, analogous candidates.

Artificial intelligence is changing everything—and fast. Or at least, that is what we’re told. Nowhere are the predictions of the transformative—and potentially disastrous—consequences of AI more dramatic than in the job market. The technology is supposed to be killing coding jobs, rendering white-collar workers obsolete, and upending the relationship between labor and capital.

There’s a slight problem for anyone making these claims, however, and that’s the actual jobs numbers. Amid all the dire talk of an AI jobs apocalypse, the American job market is remarkably stable.

Today we’re adapting an essay from Peter McCrory, Anthropic’s head of economics, on this exact mystery. Peter is uniquely positioned to weigh in. His research team studies how AI is changing economic growth and the shape of the labor market by digging into how people and businesses use AI, alongside broader economic statistics. Is today’s job market just the calm before the storm? Or are predictions of mass joblessness wide of the mark? These aren’t dry economic questions—they get at perhaps the most important issue of our time: what will it mean to live, and work, in an age of superintelligence? —The Editors

I study how AI is reshaping work, including my own. In my job as the head of economics at Anthropic, I’ve personally experienced a transformation of my work. Each new generation of frontier models, like Claude, opens up new possibilities while automating time-consuming tasks that economists do, like estimating statistical models, solving systems of mathematical equations, and creating visualizations. While I’m still directing my own research, the work is increasingly being done by AI. As I watch AI advancing and spreading within the economy—and transforming my own work—I find myself asking, Why hasn’t AI increased unemployment? What will jobs like mine look like in the coming years?

One in five American companies now uses AI in at least one part of their business. In the information sector, that number climbs to two in five. Quality-adjusted AI output—how much more capable the technology got, not just how much it’s used—grew over 2,000 percent per year in both 2024 and 2025. Even though powerful AI is relatively new, these numbers suggest that we should already be seeing some impact on the job market.

Fifty years ago today, Ronald Reagan gave one of the most important speeches of his life. While speaking to the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, Missouri, Reagan asked a powerful question: What would people of the future think if they opened a time capsule in 100 years? Would they believe Americans had met the challenges of the moment?

Reagan’s speech came at the culmination of a close-fought campaign against incumbent president Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination. Ford, a long-serving Michigan congressman, had stepped in to become vice president in 1973 after Spiro Agnew had to resign because of a bribery scandal dating back to his time as governor of Maryland. Ford then ascended to the presidency when Richard Nixon himself resigned the next year due to the Watergate scandal. This meant that while Ford was the incumbent, Reagan—who had been governor of California and had unsuccessfully run for the GOP presidential nomination against Nixon in 1968—felt that he, not Ford, was the next in line.

Ford defeated Reagan in the New Hampshire primary and then ran off a string of victories to build a big early lead. But Reagan fought back with a victory in North Carolina and picked up the momentum. Going into the August convention, the candidates were neck and neck; Ford had a slight lead in delegates but not the necessary majority. The 1976 convention would be the last Republican convention with the contest undecided going in.

Given the power of incumbency, the Reagan people knew they had to shake up the race in order to stave off defeat in Kansas City. Unfortunately for Reagan, the strategy they came up with, pre-selecting Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate, failed. The liberal Republican alienated Reagan’s conservative base and helped Ford over the top. Ford won the nomination on the first ballot by a margin of just 117 votes—1,187 to 1,070.