It’s Thursday, May 21. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Shilo Brooks sits down with Amy Coney Barrett. Liel Leibovitz on why “Podcastistan” resembles North Korea. A Stanford professor on his school’s war against the Western canon. Charles Lane reflects on the legacy of legendary congressman Barney Frank. And much more.
But first: Is the president losing his political footing?
It must be a disorienting time to be Donald Trump. On one hand, his grip on his party has never been firmer. In recent weeks, he has ousted one Republican critic after another from elected office by backing their primary challengers. That includes five Indiana lawmakers who defied Trump’s redistricting plans, along with two of the president’s critics in Congress, Senator Bill Cassidy and Rep. Thomas Massie.
On the other hand, Trump is losing the pulse of the nation at large. His approval rating has been sliding for months, and recent polls show his unpopularity reaching a level not seen since the last days of President George W. Bush.
According to Ruy Teixeira, Trump is in a quandary of his own making. Americans reelected him to revive the economy, and they still rate it as their top issue, yet Trump recently said “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” while addressing the rise of gas prices amid his war with Iran. There’s an irony to Trump’s position, says Ruy: He’s repeating the mistakes of his predecessor that landed him back in the White House. Read Ruy on the echoes of the Biden presidency in Trump’s mistakes, and why the president seems not to realize where things are headed.
Trump’s popularity may soon sink even further, if Democrats follow through on their new midterm strategy. The Free Press’s new Washington correspondent, Audrey Fahlberg, reports on Democrats’ plan to paint the administration as one giant grift at the public’s expense, from crooked crypto deals to shady executive pardons. There’s more at stake than the midterms, she writes. If Democrats regain the House, they’ll use investigations to cripple the administration and taint the GOP brand in 2028.
—The Editors
Al data centers shouldn’t raise your bills
Anthropic will cover electricity price increases from its data centers and invest in grid optimization tools, helping keep prices lower for ratepayers.
In a special episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks sits down with Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for a wide-ranging interview. They discuss Barrett’s lifelong love of reading, her tumultuous confirmation process, and what it should take to amend the Constitution. Plus: Barrett explains how she navigates cases where her interpretation of the law differs from her personal beliefs, and why the Court isn’t the hyper-partisan institution that people think it is.
Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who served more than three decades in Congress, died Wednesday at 86. Over his 16 terms in the House, he was widely known for advancing financial reforms after the Great Recession and advocating for gay rights, but in his later years, he became increasingly focused on a simple message for his party: Moderate, or die. Charles Lane reflects on Frank’s legacy, and on his parting wisdom for a Democratic Party increasingly drifting to the left.
Today marks the release of Candace Owens’ interview with Hunter Biden—an episode that lands just three days after Dave Smith’s sit-down with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes. The increasingly absurd run of headlines raises a question: Is the podcasting world growing stronger, or collapsing in on itself? According to Liel Leibovitz, the answer is both. The story of “Podcastistan,” he argues, resembles that of North Korea: a small, hysterical entity whose rulers understood that to inspire feverish devotion, “you can’t offer people mundane things like policies or even political theories. You have to offer them religion.”
Earlier this month, Stanford’s Faculty Senate voted nearly unanimously to extend COLLEGE, a new general education program that every undergraduate is required to take. But one professor, Iván Marinovic, voted against the measure. Why? Because, as he writes in our pages today, with a reading list that includes “none of the writers who built the case for liberal education that the course claims to defend,” COLLEGE is just another example of Stanford’s drift from the great Western tradition. Read his piece for a look into how his institution lost the plot, and the questions it raises about the mission of higher education.
MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS
THE NEWS
Federal prosecutors unsealed a new indictment against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro and five others on Wednesday. The murder and conspiracy charges are connected with the Cuban military’s downing of two planes in 1996, and come amid increasing tensions between the U.S. and the island nation.
Media investor James Murdoch has purchased New York magazine, the Vox news website, and the Vox Media Podcast Network on Wednesday. The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but some estimates report that Murdoch has now acquired up to half of the Vox Media brand.
Meta began laying off thousands of employees Wednesday morning, as the company continues to restructure around artificial intelligence. The company says the layoff will affect up to 8,000 employees, and 7,000 more will be reassigned to AI-focused roles.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Wednesday that they will respond to any new attacks on Iran with an escalation of the war beyond the Middle East. The threat came shortly after President Trump delayed a “very major” attack on Iran, and will likely raise the stakes of future peace talks.
On Tuesday, the Senate advanced a bill that would force President Trump to end the war with Iran. Senate Democrats have been pushing the resolution for months, but it received a major boost this week after Republican senator Bill Cassidy switched sides, following his ouster in this weekend’s primary.
According to a new report from AAA, the average gas price is now above $4 per gallon in all 50 states. The rise in prices comes amid increasing volatility in the oil market due to the Iran war. (For more on oil prices, read Tyler Cowen’s “Why Oil Price Spikes Could Spark a Global Recession.”)
On Wednesday, Harvard University faculty overwhelmingly voted to cap the number of A’s that can be earned in any undergraduate class. The move signals a return to increased competition among the school’s classes, after critics accused the university of rampant grade inflation. (For more on this, read Arthur Brooks’ “Grade Inflation Won’t Make You Happy.”)
OpenAI is reportedly preparing to file an initial public offering, potentially as soon as this Friday. The move would come at a pivotal moment for the company, just one week after CEO Sam Altman triumphed over Elon Musk in a jury trial. Musk’s company SpaceX also filed paperwork making their finances public on Wednesday, as it races toward its own IPO. (For more on SpaceX, read Patrick McGee’s “SpaceX Is the Riskiest, Biggest Tech Bet in History.”)
Al data centers shouldn’t raise your bills
Anthropic will cover electricity price increases from its data centers and invest in grid optimization tools, helping keep prices lower for ratepayers.
Because I’m a nerd and love seeing the cross-tabs on public sentiment about this stuff, I built an interactive app to visually explore how different audiences diverge across a variety of topics and dimensions. Dedicated page for FP readers here: https://votto.app/freepress
Interesting to compare sentiment of FP readers against, eg, Bulwark, National Review, etc. Answer enough takes and it’ll give you a cool readout of the throughlines and themes across your own positions too. Check it out if you enjoy cool charts, cross-tabs, and reflecting on what makes your own (and others’) beliefs distinctive.
“According to a new report from AAA, the average gas price is now above $4 per gallon in all 50 states. The rise in prices comes amid increasing volatility in the oil market due to the Iran war.”
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This stands in stark contrast to the Ukrainian flag they posted when Liz Cheney and Anne Applebaum blew up the Nordstream pipeline.