The Free Press

Edward Fishman, senior fellow and director of the Greenberg Center for Geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations, joins School of War to discuss his New York Times best-selling book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. How has the United States turned the global economy into a strategic weapon? What are the strengths and l…

On Thursday morning, online “looksmaxxing” megastar Clavicular shocked his audience by revealing that yes, he was indeed in Israel, after days of speculation about whether he was traveling to the Holy Land.

“SELL OUT,” one commenter wrote on Clavicular’s Kick livestream chat.

Within minutes, dozens of other messages appeared disparaging his trip to Israel: “fuck israel,” “KISS THE WALL GOY,” and “Shabbat shalom nigga.” His “manosphere” peers, including Adin Ross, Myron Gaines, and Sneako—many of whom have made names for themselves with anti-Israel and antisemitic content—questioned Clavicular’s integrity and whether he’d been captured by shadowy figures in Israel in the lead-up to his trip.

“Clavicular bruh, what happened to you?” Sneako asked during his Wednesday livestream, after an AI-generated photo of Clavicular kissing the Western Wall surfaced on X. “Free Clav.”

Their surprise seems warranted given that fewer than six months ago Clavicular, the 20-year-old looksmaxxing figurehead, made international headlines for partying to “Heil Hitler”—a widely banned Kanye West song that samples audio of an Adolf Hitler speech—alongside pals like far-right streamer Nick Fuentes. Looksmaxxing, a male-dominated subculture obsessed with improving one’s physical appearance by any means necessary, has traditionally been covered as a right-wing phenomenon that originated on incel message boards. But Clavicular told me that he’s “not a political guy.”

The press has fixated lately on a supposed civil war between the Democratic Party’s moderate establishment and its left-wing flank. Hard-left newcomers won House primaries in New York and Colorado by condemning Israel and billionaires, and Graham Platner vanquished a sitting governor in the Maine Senate primary with the same progressive message before suspending his campaign on Wednesday after a sexual-assault allegation.

Yet a closer look at the party suggests that there is no war—at least, not yet. Progressive populists keep winning, while Democratic incumbents have failed to persuasively criticize their challengers’ most radical views. The next major test for the party will take place in less than a month, when Michigan voters choose their Senate candidate.

And the biggest question is whether anyone can stop Abdul El-Sayed.

The 41-year-old public health official is leading a far-left primary campaign against moderate congresswoman Haley Stevens to succeed retiring senator Gary Peters. The race recently narrowed from three to two candidates when state senator Mallory McMorrow, who attempted to split the gap between the progressive and moderate wings, suspended her campaign. The resulting “head-on collision” will be the cycle’s best look at whether an uncompromising progressive can win a swing state.

Had I known. Had I known. Had I known.

That phrase has been agonizingly stuck in Tammy Poirier’s head since October 16, 2023. That day, her 15-year-old son Owen, a star on the local high-school soccer team, was kicked out of school by the superintendent and principal for allegedly touching a 16-year-old girl’s crotch on a school bus three days earlier.

“I didn’t do this,” Owen said when his parents arrived at school to pick him up. All they knew was that their son had been accused and suspended that morning, and that he was facing a criminal investigation.

Owen’s parents drove him home. In the car, he expressed the fear of letting his soccer team down because he wouldn’t be allowed to play in the state championships that week. That afternoon, he died by suicide.

Had I known. Had I known. Had I known.

Tammy Poirier said it again and again while we sat in her husband Chad’s office at the family’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning business in upstate New York. Owen’s suicide happened just outside the building. As she spoke, tears fell from her cheeks and landed on her jeans.

Three weeks ago, conventional wisdom held that readers were bored by books about Donald Trump. What more was there to say about the man who has dominated American public life for a decade? Then Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan published Regime Change.

Written by two reporters with unrivaled access to the White House, the book sold more than 300,000 copies in its first week—making it the fastest-selling nonfiction hardcover of the year so far. It argues that Trump’s return to office marks a fundamental transformation of the presidency, defined by an unprecedented expansion of executive power. Is that a convincing argument? We asked the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell to read the book and let us know what he thought. One of the sharpest observers of the rise of Trump, and the big-picture trends that brought him to power, Caldwell offers his view not just of Regime Change but of the meaning of Trump’s second term in today’s Big Read. —The Editors

“Essentially I won every fucking time,” Donald Trump told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in March, in a profanity-laced valedictory interview for their new book, Regime Change. “And I’m tired of winning and winning and winning and just getting bad fucking press.”

What citizen of any nation would wish such a vulgarian at its head? And yet who can doubt that he’s right, at least sometimes? This is the paradox: Understanding the crudest man ever to occupy the White House requires delicacy. If deep access to White House secrets has made this book a bestseller since its June release, what has turned it into a bestseller of warehouse-emptying proportions is its nuance.

Nuance has lately been in short supply. The president has suffered a humiliating defeat in a Middle Eastern war he launched against the wiser counsel of most of his advisers. The middle class is discontented, and the clamor for economic redistribution is louder than it has been since the 1930s. Many of Trump’s detractors claim to have told us so. Elect a barbarian and you’ll get a barbarian. Simple as that. What did you expect?

Is the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran over? Is the memorandum of understanding dead? On Wednesday, those questions were put to President Donald Trump at the NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey, a gathering that came on the heels of renewed strikes between the U.S. and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz.

Here, to make sense of the fragile state of the strait, …

Dear Abigail,

My wife and I have known each other for 20 years, and for 20 years, we’ve been unable to talk about money without fighting. She wants to spend without regard for our budget, and I want to save. We have two daughters, who are in second and third grade, and I worry about paying for college, camp, cars, everything. We share a bank account and credit card, but for some reason (I think her mom’s advice), my wife has always insisted on also having her own separate bank account and credit card. I think she doesn’t want me bitching about her buying shoes and facial products, and she’s probably right, because I’m sure I would bitch about that.

My wife’s salary is about half of mine—I also get bonuses if work’s going well, but they’re not guaranteed, which adds to my anxiety—but I made a deal with her: I’m fine with her keeping her own account as long as she puts roughly half her paycheck into our joint account to help pay for our family’s expenses, and so I can keep track of whether we are saving money or losing money.

For years she’s played games with this, randomly transferring money from our joint account to hers without telling me what it is for, or not adding the full amount we agreed upon. Any time I ask her about this, we get into a huge fight. She thinks I’m cheap and crazy about money, and I think she doesn’t care about the future.

Over the past six months, she has stopped contributing about 25 percent of the amount we agreed to, which is really affecting our budget. I brought this up a few months ago, and she said she would fix it. I looked at our account today: She is still not adding the money she promised. I sent her a text today about it, and she did not respond.

Meanwhile, she’s been on my case about taking our kids to Disney for the first time next year—which is something I’d love to do, but it annoys me that she wants to spend money on a trip when she hasn’t been helping with savings. Last month, our credit card bill was way over budget, and she still decided to hire someone to fix our driveway. She feels: If it needs to get fixed, it needs to get fixed. She may be right about that. I once came home and flipped out when I saw she hired someone to cut down a bunch of trees—I would’ve waited until the trees were a day away from falling on the house—because I stress about spending money on things we need, too.

But at some point, when you spend more than you make, you eventually lose all your money.

—Mark, 41

Mark,

Public urinals—I am told—are plagued by a nasty feedback loop. The first man splashes on the urinal cake, creating a small dribble on the floor. The next man stands a little farther back, to avoid the wet tile. Because he’s farther away, he misses a bit, and the dribble expands to a puddle. The man after him stands still farther back, missing badly. Pretty soon, the puddle is huge and the bathroom is disgusting. This according to my husband, who is proud to have discovered what he believes to be the perfect example of a “vicious cycle.”

You and your wife are stuck in one, dear Mark. (Not a urinal—a cycle.) Things are getting worse between you and your wife because they’ve gotten worse.

It’s Thursday, July 9. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Eli Lake on Graham Platner’s attempt to make himself a martyr. Inside the 2028 Republican shadow primary. The immigration hard-liners suing the Trump administration over deportations. And much more.

But first: The war with Iran is officially back on.

At the NATO summit in Turkey yesterday, President Donald Trump declared the memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran dead. Iran attacked three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, triggering a wave of U.S. strikes that continued into Wednesday. Trump reimposed the naval blockade and said he wasn’t sure he wanted a deal at all. “We can play games,” he told reporters, “but I’m not sure I want to make a deal. Let’s just finish the job.”

So where do we go from here? Aaron MacLean argues that the administration’s original sin was failing to anticipate Iran’s most obvious countermove: closing the Strait of Hormuz. The ceasefire agreed upon three weeks ago was built on self-deception, with the United States claiming that the MOU required Iran to open the strait when its text said nothing of the sort. Now, with the agreement dead and strikes resuming, Trump faces four choices. Read Aaron on what those options are, and why only one of them offers a real way out.

Meanwhile, as millions gather in Iranian cities to mourn the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iranian dissident Masih Alinejad has been hearing a very different story from people inside the country. What the Islamic Republic is staging as a display of strength, she argues, is instead a performance. Read Masih on what’s really happening on the ground.

—The Editors

• The Trump administration cleared OpenAI to release its most powerful AI model, GPT-5.6, with a public launch set for today. The move follows a government-mandated staggered rollout last month of the same model, which restricted access to approved entities while officials conducted additional testing.

• A federal judge ordered yesterday that Trump must hand over a $5 million judgment to writer E. Jean Carroll, after the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal last week. A Manhattan jury awarded Carroll the sum in 2023 after finding Trump liable for sexually assaulting and defaming her. Trump’s lawyers have filed a rehearing request and said they would appeal the order.

• Kentucky governor Andy Beshear sent a letter to Senator Mitch McConnell’s office on Wednesday, urging him to be transparent about his health after 24 days of silence from the 84-year-old. With rampant speculation circulating about his condition, Beshear said his constituents deserve answers about whether McConnell can continue to serve.

• At the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump said the U.S. will allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot air defense systems by granting it a production license—a significant win for Kyiv, which has been pressing for the capability for years. Trump met with President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the summit, praising him as having “done an amazing job” in the war.

• The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during a Houston immigration raid Tuesday, is calling for an independent investigation into his death. The Department of Homeland Security said the agent fired in self-defense after Salgado Araujo attempted to ram an officer with a vehicle.

• Former Milwaukee County judge Hannah Dugan was fined $5,000 but spared prison after being convicted of obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant. The penalty falls well below the 15- to 21-month sentence in the federal guidelines.

• Egypt filed an official complaint with FIFA after blowing a 2–0 lead in the final minutes of its World Cup game against Argentina, alleging that inconsistent Video Assistant Referee (VAR) decisions directly influenced the outcome.

• Emmy nominations are out, and HBO Max’s medical drama The Pitt led all shows with 25 nods. The final season of Hacks set a comedy record with 24 nominations. A win for Jean Smart in September would tie the all-time record for acting Emmys by a single performer.

Graham Platner just relinquished his chance to become the next senator from Maine. But he may have won something even more valuable: an origin story.

On Wednesday evening, Graham Platner broadcast a video message from his deck. “We believe that for the movement to continue,” the self-described oysterman said after long pauses, “it can’t be me. And for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations.”

This was not an apology. Platner did not ask forgiveness for the litany of scandals that have been revealed about him since October. The latest and most serious arrived Monday, when Politico broke the news of a rape allegation by Platner’s ex-girlfriend, Jenny Racicot. She says Platner entered her home uninvited and heavily intoxicated and raped her. While Platner denies the allegation, he did not spend much time defending himself in his message on Wednesday. Instead, the candidate spent the vast majority of the 11-minute, 16-second video telling his supporters that they’d been robbed.

“The brutal political reality is that they are going to take everything away from us,” he said with a steady anger. “Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things that we need to run a campaign.” Specifically that meant the “ability to fundraise,” and his campaign’s access to voter data. Without these basic tools, no modern campaign can function.

Over the past few days, it has been nearly impossible to avoid coverage of the funeral for Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli air strike on February 28. Carefully choreographed footage shows seas of mourners dressed in black, filling the streets, as crowds chant “Death to America” and wave the flag of the Iranian regime.

Based on the images the regime is broadcasting, one could easily conclude that the country has come to a standstill to mourn its fallen leader. But for anyone watching the funeral, which began Saturday and ends Thursday, I have one piece of advice: Don’t take what you’re seeing at face value.

In the months since Khamenei’s death, I have received hundreds of messages from friends and contacts inside Iran. They are not messages of grief but of disbelief, relief and, when people feel safe enough, joy. A woman from Isfahan told me in March that she had been dancing in the street with strangers. A man in Tehran sent a voice note laughing so hard he could barely speak. Then he caught himself: “Don’t use my name.”

He was still afraid. They are always afraid.

The Islamic Republic has billed this week’s ceremony as the largest state funeral in Iran’s history: a six-day spectacle, complete with processions through multiple cities and red flags of revenge billowing over those gathered at the Grand Mosalla. But the people who sent me those messages were not attending. They were heading to the coast.