It’s Tuesday, March 24. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Madeleine Rowley interviews the men behind the White House meme team. Aaron MacLean asks: Are boots on the ground in the cards? Amit Segal on why Trump reversed course in the Strait of Hormuz. And much more.
But first: Cuba calls its best defenders.
Today the lights are off in Cuba for the third time in a month, and the communists in charge are having a hard time explaining it away. President Miguel Díaz-Canel deployed the regime’s perennial excuse over the weekend, blaming U.S. pressure for the entirety of Cuba’s woes. He said President Donald Trump is “cruelly squeezing energy resources,” referring to the blockade that has kept Venezuelan oil out since the U.S. seized that country’s strongman in January.
With protests roiling Havana and Trump’s sights set on the island as his next target, what can Cuba’s rulers possibly do to save themselves? The answer is to rely on progressive influencers. Like many anti-American regimes before it, the government Castro built is betting that friendly publicity in the Western press can save it like no weapon or subterfuge could.
Cuba helped bring in left-wing journalists, influencers including streamer Hasan Piker, ex-politicians like former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the Irish band Kneecap, to defend them from Trump and sing the praises of the Castros. James Kirchick describes the absurd spectacle of Cuba’s useless idiots in his column for us today. Read his piece on an island with no electricity—and the stars of the international left-wing internet who arrived to save Cuba with their posts.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to stare down the Cuban dictatorship and hasn’t blinked yet. Martin Gurri believes that an attempt at regime change is inevitable, and the only questions are how and when. On one hand, Cubans are more than ready for a change—more than 20 percent have fled in the past five years alone. But the regime won’t fold as easily as it did in Venezuela, due in part to an anti-American zeal that has festered for decades.
—Mene Ukueberuwa
On Monday morning, London woke to the news that four ambulances belonging to a Jewish organization had been firebombed. Two days earlier, Zoe Strimpel happened upon a British art show called “Drawings Against Genocide,” where she saw antisemitic imagery disguised as artistic criticism of Israel. Taken together, they paint a grim and all too unsurprising picture for British Jews. “There is a connection,” writes Zoe. “The former creates a permission structure for the latter.”
What happens when the young meme creators of the Trump White House go to war? For starters, you get footage of Donald Trump strutting to rap songs while threatening to “bomb the shit” out of America’s rivals. Madeleine Rowley talks to the meme men behind the viral and sometimes unhinged White House social media posts about their formula, and how Team Trump is still able to make “scroll-stopping content in a world where people see thousands of posts a day.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s nephew has a bone to pick with the protesters of today, who he says would do well to remember the simple reason why his uncle’s protests were so successful—nonviolence. In a piece for The Free Press, Isaac Newton Farris Jr. explains how protests in recent years went off the rails, and why King’s nonviolence worked while violence always fails.
And ICYMI, watch Coleman Hughes, MLK biographer Jonathan Eig, and civil rights legend Ambassador Andrew Young in conversation in Atlanta on “Nonviolence in a Violent Age.”
On Saturday night, Trump gave the Iranian regime 48 hours to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—or the United States would begin to strike its power plants. But two days later, he announced that he was suspending the threat for five days. “With all the chaos surrounding the strait, the original focus of the war seems to have been forgotten,” writes Amit Segal. He explains the president’s reversal, the reasoning behind his Hormuz obsession, and what comes next.
On this episode of School of War, Rich Goldberg, senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Garrett Exner, executive director of the Public Interest Fellowship, break down what’s really happening in the Iran war, whether the Strait of Hormuz will soon reopen, and the key question hanging over the whole operation: What are the odds of a ground campaign in the coming weeks?
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THE NEWS
Leonid Radvinsky, the reclusive billionaire owner of OnlyFans, died at 43 on Monday after a battle with cancer that he kept secret from the public. The Ukrainian American entrepreneur acquired the platform in 2018 and was reportedly in talks as recently as last year to sell a majority stake of the porn-driven company.
ICE agents lent a hand to TSA at more than a dozen airports across the country Monday, including New York City’s JFK and Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, as a weeks-long partial government shutdown has left 50,000 TSA officers working without pay and thousands calling out sick. Border Czar Tom Homan said the agents will handle crowd control at entrances and exits—rather than screenings—though it remains unclear whether they will also conduct immigration sweeps.
Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni conceded defeat Monday in a national referendum on judicial reform, marking a major blow to her right-wing coalition. Around 50 magistrates packed a Naples courthouse to watch the results come in, and broke into the anti-fascist resistance anthem “Bella Ciao” when it became clear the government had lost.
Two pilots were killed and more than 40 people injured Sunday night when an Air Canada jet collided with a fire truck on a runway at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. Air traffic control audio from the incident reveals a controller clearing the truck to cross the runway before, seconds later, admitting: “I messed up.”
The Trump administration installed a statue of Christopher Columbus over the weekend on the White House grounds—a replica of one toppled and thrown into a harbor in Baltimore by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. “In this White House, Christopher Columbus is a hero,” a White House spokesperson said.
Prediction market Kalshi will ban athletes, coaches, and politicians from betting on their own sports and campaigns, respectively, Axios reports. The planned crackdown comes on the heels of a lawsuit against Kalshi filed in an Arizona court last week alleging the platform operates an illegal gambling business.
And for their next trip, may I suggest North Korea?
One more time: British “antisemitism” isn’t exactly antisemitism; it’s Woke. Guys are getting jailed for questioning “gender affirming care” or noting Islamic violence and fraud. You cannot fix what you misdiagnose.