Is This What America Voted For?

It’s Thursday, February 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: How Trump might save Justin Trudeau’s party. Robert De Niro tortures a Tucker Carlson stand-in on Netflix. Young people go to church; the #Resistance is back; and a cocaine wig debuts at the Cartagena airport.

But first: Are Americans getting what they voted for?

For the last month, Elon Musk’s DOGE committee has taken a central role in reshaping the government. The administration says it’s enacting the Trump agenda—but is it the agenda people actually wanted?

In his latest for The Free Press, Ruy Teixeira writes that certain Trump policies are popular, like banning biological men from women’s sports, cracking down on illegal immigration, and ditching DEI. Most Americans also agree that government waste—the thing Elon is claiming to tackle—is a big problem.

In theory, this means Americans should be happy with the first days of the Trump administration. But in practice, Elon’s favorability ratings have fallen into the gutter and a majority of voters now say the president doesn’t have his priorities straight.

Is it possible that Trump has overestimated his mandate—and is now going too far?

Find out by reading Ruy’s new column, “Is This What America Voted For?”

Americans Love Conspiracies. Netflix Doesn’t Get Them.

Americans are a conspiracy-minded people. Less than a quarter of us trust our government. Sixty-five percent of us believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. Almost nobody believes Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.

Okay, maybe that’s just me. But belief in an all-powerful, faceless authority is very common. More than 40 percent of Americans believe that a secret group of elites control the world regardless of whoever is “officially” in charge.

All of this means we love conspiracy theories—and entertainment based on them, like Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK. Recently Netflix released Zero Day, a new drama in the genre. It stars Robert De Niro as a cognitively impaired former president called George Mullen who seems a lot like Joe Biden. After a mysterious cyber attack kills over 3,000 Americans, Mullen is tasked with finding those responsible and given unconstitutional tools to accomplish the job.

The problem is that Zero Day presumes Americans trust the government, when nothing could be further from the truth. I was shocked at how swampy its politics were—until I realized it was co-created by a former head of NBC and a former national security reporter for The New York Times.

This show, as a result, is an establishment revenge fantasy that lets the system off the hook. And it reveals how out of touch the elites truly are.

Read my piece: “The New Robert De Niro Show Is Elite Propaganda.”

How Trump Might Save Canada’s Liberal Party

At the beginning of January, things were looking up for Canada’s Conservative Party. Their leader, Pierre Poilievre, was surging in the polls. Meanwhile, his opponent, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was struggling with widespread unpopularity and discontent in his ranks—so much so that he announced he’d resign once his Liberal Party picks another leader.

It looked as if a Conservative victory in the upcoming election was assured. Then, on January 20, Trump was inaugurated.

Today in The Free Press, our Canadian correspondent Rupa Subramanya shows how a looming trade war is tanking support for the Conservative Party in the polls, and might just ruin their chances at the ballot box later this year.

Read “Will Trump’s Tariffs Rob Victory From Canada’s Conservatives?”

Marlean Ames outside of her lawyer’s office in Akron, Ohio, on February 20, 2025. Ames claims she was passed over for jobs because she is a straight woman and that gay people were given positions she was more qualified for. (Maddie McGarvey/for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

• The European Commission loosened its requirements on companies to report their social and environmental impacts to the EU. The move is a major pro-business signal from Europe’s governing body, meant to encourage greater investment and growth for the continent’s faltering economy. The European commissioner for the economy said plainly that “We cannot hope or expect to successfully compete in a perilous world with one hand tied behind our backs.” Finally, Europeans can stop worrying about the price of carbon credits while getting drunk on their six-hour lunch breaks.

• Trump held his first cabinet meeting yesterday, just one day after the House passed its first budget under the new administration. His efforts to lower taxes, slash the federal budget, and reduce the deficit took center stage at the meeting. Also: Trump pushed his “gold card” idea, in which rich foreigners can pay $5 million for a green card, and called the cost of eggs “a disaster.” In case you missed it, earlier this month the administration “accidentally fired” the USDA employees working on the bird flu vaccine. Whoops.
  

• Ice Cube once said “If you scared, go to church,” and it looks like the Zoomers are getting pretty frightened! The results of a new study show—quite starkly—that Christianity’s decline has come to an end, a change largely driven by young adults. The number of American Christians has now held steady for several years following decades of secularization and declining religious affiliation. Citizens born between 2000 and 2006, however, have bucked the irreligious trend, while the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has also leveled off.
  

• Dust off those pink pussy hats, the #Resistance libs are back, baby! After a month characterized by a notable dearth of protests, the crowds are beginning to show up. Students—like at Stanford this past week—are shouting down conservative speakers, and Democrats nationwide are seeing a surge in fundraising as they begin to launch legal battles against the administration. Overflow crowds have inundated Bernie Sanders’ rallies. His adviser said, “There is a lot more anger building, such that we are seeing in deep-red Republican-held districts that people are coming out.”

• President Trump and Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky have reached a “preliminary” agreement on a minerals deal. The deal does not include security guarantees for Ukraine and Zelensky, and Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting “We’re going to have Europe do that because. . . Europe is their next-door neighbor.” The leaders are scheduled to meet at the White House Friday.

• On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that Marlean Ames was unfairly discriminated against because she is straight. The Ohio woman, who worked as an executive secretary at the Ohio Department of Youth Services for over a decade, says she was demoted, given a pay cut, and replaced by a less qualified gay man, then later missed out on a promotion to a lesbian colleague who hadn’t even applied for it.

• A 40-year-old man was caught trying to smuggle 220 grams of cocaine into Amsterdam by hiding it under a firmly attached toupee. Police arrested the suspect at Colombia’s Cartagena airport, removing his “narco wig” with scissors to unveil twelve packets of blow worth $10,000.