The Free Press

“Trump’s Moneymaking Run: Unrivaled in Presidential History.”

So read the headline in Wednesday’s New York Times, after the release of President Donald Trump’s financial disclosure report showing that he had reaped at least $2.2 billion in gains since returning to the White House, largely due to the cryptocurrency businesses set up by his sons Eric and Donald Jr.

But it’s not just the moneymaking that’s unrivaled. It’s also the flagrant appearance of corruption that those billions represent.

You do not need to think Trump is the end of American democracy, or that everything he does is evil, to see this for what it is: the biggest grift in American history. For all the condemnation of the so-called “Biden Crime Family” by Republicans—and Burisma and Hunter Biden were not high moments—it pales in comparison to what is happening in this presidency.

It’s true that Trump is far from the first president to profit from the office in our country’s now 250-year history. But most of them waited until they left office, and stuck to cushy board seats and speaking gigs. Bill Clinton reportedly earned more than $75 million on the speaking circuit in his first decade out of office. George W. Bush’s net worth increased by some $50 million after leaving office.

But there is no modern parallel for the scale and shamelessness with which Trump has enriched himself while in power. Most Americans should understand what is happening: a transfer of wealth from them—and perhaps foreigners—to the president.

Americans already knew that President Donald Trump is getting richer than ever. After all, he often tells us himself. “We’re all profiting,” he told reporters on Wednesday, citing the rising stock market. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”

Yet Trump’s financial disclosure released the same morning shows something very different about the state of his estate. Rather than stocks or even real estate, nearly two-thirds of his income last year—a staggering $1.4 billion—came from a pair of cryptocurrency ventures that he created before his reelection and which surged around the time he took office.

Trump’s shyness about discussing his crypto windfall suggests that he knows the ethics don’t look good, as my colleagues discuss in our latest editorial. At the same time, we can infer something important from his painstaking approach to reporting the details, in the form of a 927-page disclosure. That is, he’s pretty sure it’s all legal.

It’s an amazing proposition, given how brazen the arrangement appears. It’s rare enough that Trump isn’t known to have divested from any significant non-diversified holdings for the sake of avoiding a conflict of interest, as both Presidents Bush did before they took office. Trump put his assets in a trust and turned over management to his sons. But he still knows what he owns, and there’s nothing stopping him from making policy choices meant to boost it.

According to officials at Harvard University, its antisemitism problem is under control. Reports of antisemitic incidents on campus are down after the numbers exploded in the wake of October 7, 2023. Today, 170 Jewish and non-Jewish Harvard faculty members will publish a letter stating that there is more to the story, and that while there’s less overt antisemitism at the university this past year, a more insidious form of Jew-hate has emerged. Jewish students are hiding their Star of David necklaces and scrubbing their CVs of references to Israel to self-protect. Two signatories to the letter explain what’s still not working—and what the school should do about it. —The Editors

When hate turns quiet on campus, it can mean one of two things: First, that the hate has been eliminated from the university, or second, that it has morphed into more insidious forms. What we, as Jewish and Israeli faculty, staff, and students at Harvard University have witnessed over the past year, appears to be the latter.

While incidents of overt antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias have diminished throughout this academic year at Harvard, Jewish students still report feeling uncomfortable and isolated. These students, with whom we have been in direct contact, said they feel compelled to hide their full identities on campus in order to avoid ostracization and bias. Unsurprisingly, they report these choices and circumstances while insisting on anonymity for fear of retribution.

This alarming trend persists despite the emergence of now thriving and welcoming Jewish and Israeli safe spaces such as Harvard Hillel, Chabad, and Harvard Faculty for Israel. Some students and faculty have told us that outside of these trusted Jewish spaces, they are afraid to express their full identities; reveal details of, or even mention, connectivity to and work in Israel; include experiences on their CVs that indicate that they are Jewish; wear their kippah; or uncover their Star of David. A number of these students say it is a matter of self-protection and the only way to get through their educational experience at Harvard.

There’s a scene in the brand-new Supergirl where the titular heroine, having suffered a crushing defeat, launches herself into the stratosphere to experience what screenwriters refer to as “a dark night of the soul.” In space, nobody can hear you scream, and so that’s what she does—howling soundlessly into the vacuum before turning away and returning to Earth. The camera, however, lingers to make sure you see what she’s left behind: a single tear, floating in the emptiness, glittering in the distant sun.

It’s hard to overstate how devastating this moment was—in that it was the moment I had to admit to myself that I was wasting two hours of a perfectly lovely summer day watching a pretty terrible movie.

The new comic-book tentpole from the freshly rebooted DC Universe, and a spin-off sequel to last summer’s crowd-pleasing Superman, Supergirl was supposed to kick off this summer’s blockbuster movie slate with a bang. So, when the film opened last weekend to lukewarm reviews and abysmal ticket sales, underperforming its already-pessimistic projected box-office numbers by nearly 25 percent, the critical apparatus thought long and hard about just how such a thing could have. . . ha ha ha, yeah, I’m just kidding: They basically immediately blamed misogyny.

Those lousy box-office numbers? The product of “resurgent misogyny among the core fan base, which is largely male,” declared The New York Times. Those terrible reviews? “There’s a simple answer: misogyny,” griped Entertainment Weekly. Variety, whose own critic loathed the film, published a second, scathing editorial blaming the studio for not putting more “care and consideration” into Supergirl, to give the film a fighting chance against the “hordes of online misogynists” who lose their minds over the mere idea of a superhero without a penis: “Who can forget the manly meltdown over women-only screenings of Wonder Woman?”

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, David Mamet wrote about Paul Dresser, the songwriter from Indiana who gave America its first great pop hit. Today, David A. Price pays tribute to Frederick Douglass, who famously asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” —The Editors

To be a speaker on the same bill with Frederick Douglass could be frustrating. His fellow abolitionists on the lecture circuit, black and white, “would sometimes get angry,” recalled the black abolitionist William Wells Brown. They “would speak first at the meetings; then they would take the last turn; but it was all the same—the fugitive’s impression was the one left upon the mind.”

Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Baltimore in 1838, was a sought-after orator in an age that prized stirring oration. In the North and in Britain, his rich voice and his direct and engaging words made him a star. Early in his speaking days, a well-meaning white abolitionist leader urged him, without success, to “have a little of the plantation” in his speaking style—or else who would credit that he had once been a slave?

He was in peak form on the morning of July 5, 1852, in his adopted hometown of Rochester, New York. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society had set that date for its Independence Day celebration because the fourth that year fell on a Sunday. An audience of more than 500 crowded into the city’s Corinthian Hall and witnessed Douglass, 34, deliver what is the most famous Independence Day address in American history—and also the most misunderstood.

As a Brit, watching the World Cup come to America has brought up some familiar feelings. The cynic in me sees various Europeans gallivanting across the United States, amazed by a Buc-ee’s with 100 gas pumps, and thinks: “Why are they so impressed?” But their wide-eyed discoveries also remind me of when I fell in love with America.

In the summer of 2014, fresh out of my second year at university in England, I applied for something called Camp America. Part cultural exchange, part babysitting, it is a program that for over 50 years has offered Brits in their 20s the chance to work at summer camps in the U.S. I found out about it because my mom worked at a camp in Poughkeepsie, New York, during the 1980s. She told me it was the best thing she had ever done. I didn’t believe her, but I thought I would give it a go anyway.

In return for a few hundred pounds, Camp America agreed to set me up with a summer camp somewhere in America, sorting out my visas and making sure that I got paid. The rest was up to me. From my university dorm in a gray English town, I chose an option that seemed as good as any other: a small, slightly scruffy Jewish camp called Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camp, or BHEC for short. It was in Columbia County, New York, with a lake, a ropes course, and a cheerful website that looked like it was made in the 1990s. The nearest town was a one-stoplight kind of place that somehow sustained a deli, a gas station, and a diner. I remember arriving there in early June and feeling like I had stepped onto a movie set.

I had been to America before, and even lived in California for a few months, but never as an adult. Like many Europeans raised on a diet of American culture, I thought I understood the States. I knew that the people were loud and ambitious, that they didn’t care about the world beyond their borders, and that they loved guns and big sodas and baseball.

Kamala! How can we miss you if you won’t go away?

The failed 2024 Democratic presidential candidate is clearly serious about running again. Just today, Axios reports that she is making overtures to the faction in the party that has all the momentum right now, talking to New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, progressive groups, and pro-Palestinian activists.

The idea that Kamala Harris could once again be the Democrats’ nominee for president is not taken seriously by most observers. After all, Democrats could not possibly do something so, well, stupid, given her catastrophic campaign in 2024. Who would take another chance on her at this point?

Democratic voters, that’s who. By no means is the nomination hers (or anyone else’s) for the taking. But the conventional wisdom radically underestimates her chances—as do the betting markets, with Polymarket giving her just a 6 percent chance of being the Democratic nominee.

I beg to differ. Here’s why I think everyone is wrong in discounting her chances.

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week, Jonathan looks at the dramatic vote for independence in the Continental Congress. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

As we celebrate America’s birthday this week, count on hearing no shortage of quotations from Massachusetts delegate John Adams, who delivered the closing argument in favor of independence at the Continental Congress 250 years ago today. Almost sure to go unquoted will be the man who delivered the closing argument for the other side. Yet there’s no better way to appreciate the enormous risks that our Founders took in declaring independence than to read the words of the motion’s most eloquent opponent: John Dickinson of Pennsylvania.

Among delegates to the Continental Congress, few could match the 43-year-old Dickinson in fame in 1776. Described as “tall but slender as a reed,” he had risen to the pinnacle of Philadelphia society as a lawyer and made a name for himself across the colonies as the author of the celebrated Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in protest of British abuses. The arguments in these essays might have put some on the path to breaking with Britain but not the author himself. Though a staunch advocate for American liberty, Dickinson held out hope for reconciliation.

Talk of peace with Britain annoyed no one more than Adams, who chalked up the delusion to, among other things, the pacifism of Quakers (Dickinson’s wife was a member of the Society of Friends). “A certain great fortune and piddling genius whose fame has been trumpeted so loudly has given a silly cast to our whole doings,” Adams wrote in 1775 of Dickinson in a private letter that unfortunately for both men ended up in the hands of the British and then in the columns of newspapers.

It’s Wednesday, July 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: Olivia Reingold and Peter Savodnik on the latest win for the DSA and the fight for the future of the Democratic Party. Jill Schlesinger on why you shouldn’t take financial advice from Boomers. David Mamet’s entry in our Great Americans series. And much more.

But first: The justices tangle with girls’ sports and citizenship.

The Supreme Court closed out its term yesterday with a flurry of major rulings. The justices upheld birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s attempt to deny it to children of parents in the country illegally or on temporary visas. It also affirmed that states can bar biological male athletes from girls’ and women’s sports. Today, our writers dig into what these rulings mean.

By a 5–4 vote, the justices held that children born to illegal immigrants and people on temporary visas are American citizens at birth. Jed Rubenfeld calls it a victory not just for the Constitution but for the country—regardless of which side of the issue you’re on. He walks through why the dissenters’ arguments, while not as crazy as the caricatured version of them presented by the media, get the history wrong. Jed also zooms out and looks at the bigger lesson from the decisions made by the Court this term. Read Jed to understand the most anticipated ruling of the year—and the state of play in the fight between the executive and the judiciary.

The Court also ruled yesterday that states may keep biological males off female sports teams. Ilya Shapiro explains the law behind the decision: Title IX, the 1972 law guaranteeing equal athletic opportunity for women, was built from the start around the existence of separate sex categories. The majority, Shapiro argues, simply read the law as it was always written.

Meanwhile, Paula Scanlan lays out the ruling’s stakes. She knows what it’s like to share a locker room with a male athlete and be told to act like it’s normal. As a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, she was one of Lia Thomas’s teammates, and one of the girls who raised concerns to coaches about showering and undressing in front of a male athlete, only to be offered counseling to help her come to terms with it. Today, she celebrates the Court’s ruling and describes what it will mean for the next generation of women in sports.

—The Editors

Last week’s socialist sweep of New York City’s Democratic primaries sent a loud message, and the party is still figuring out what to do with it. Today, our writers describe what comes next—and whether anyone can stop the wave.

The clash between socialists and “establishment” Democrats continued in another race this week—and socialism keeps on rolling. Olivia Reingold profiles Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old first-time candidate who yesterday defeated the longest-serving member of Colorado’s congressional delegation. She’s a political newcomer who declined to call a firebomb attack on Jews “antisemitic” and justified the attacks of October 7 as “inevitable.” Read Olivia’s piece on Kiros and what her candidacy says about where the party is headed.

Not every Democrat is going along with the tide. Peter Savodnik talks to Tom Suozzi, the Long Island congressman who, days after last week’s primaries, unveiled the “Promise to America”—a pledge to fight back on behalf of capitalism, free speech, and what he sees as the party’s founding ideals. The left and the right, Suozzi tells Peter, want to “tear it all down.” Read his piece to see what Suozzi is seeking for the country.

The socialist wave didn’t come out of nowhere. Olivia has been covering the far left since she first started reporting for The Free Press in 2022—and none of what happened last week surprised her. Today, between 2 and 3 p.m. ET, she’ll answer all your questions in the Forum.

Walt Whitman isn’t America’s greatest poet, David Mamet argues. Paul Dresser is. Dresser was the author of “On the Banks of the Wabash,” a friend to prostitutes and, Mamet argues, the true bard of the American Songbook. Like Irving Berlin, he couldn’t read music. Like Yeats, he could write it in a way you’d never forget.

• American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Qatar yesterday to talk with mediators about ending the war in Iran, as Tehran said it had no plans for direct meetings with the U.S. in the coming days. Iran and Oman still plan to collect fees from ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, despite American objections.

• National Public Radio quickly retracted an article on Tuesday that incorrectly reported Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring from the bench. NPR reporter Nina Totenberg apologized directly to Alito, saying, “It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism.”

• Representative Tom Kean returned to the House floor after a four-month absence from the chamber, revealing he had been hospitalized with depression. The New Jersey Republican missed more than 100 consecutive votes in what was one of the longest absences by a sitting member of Congress.

• Speaker Mike Johnson sent members on summer recess early after a group of House Republicans blocked a defense spending bill for a second straight week, demanding Trump’s election legislation be attached to it first. Neither chamber will return until July 13.

• LeBron James told the Los Angeles Lakers that he will not return next season, ending his eight-year run with the team and setting off a free agency chase among championship contenders. Golden State, Miami, and Cleveland are all expected to make pitches as he prepares for a record 24th NBA season.

• Actress Blake Lively is seeking $8 million in legal fees from director Justin Baldoni and his production company following the dismissal of his $400 million defamation suit, which her legal team called a “gross abuse of the legal system.”

• The White House tapped Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb to lead a new scientific advisory council focused on national security threats posed by UFOs. (Watch Will Rahn’s interview with Loeb about his search for alien life and what their presence might mean for humans.)

Beginning in the 2010s, medical transition for minors—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgeries—went from rare to something closer to routine in a matter of years.

Between 2017 and 2021, the number of American children diagnosed with gender dysphoria who began puberty blockers doubled. Between 2013 and 2020, the rate at which teenage girls underwent double mastectomies increased thirteenfold. And pediatric gender clinics grew from a small handful nationwide to over a hundred.