The Free Press
It’s Monday, January 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: Martin Gurri on rebuilding the open society; Eli Lake on the “restrainers” filling the Pentagon; Peter Savodnik on the culture war coming to an Alaskan mountain; Tanya Lukyanova on what it’s really like to buy groceries in Russia; and more.
But first: Trump’s Sunday showdown with Colombia.
Trump has been in office a week and already, it’s very clear there’s a new sheriff in town.
Take the president’s Sunday standoff with Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro. If you were happily watching football, or hanging out with your family, or otherwise unplugging, allow me to recap.
On Sunday morning, American military aircraft transporting Colombian deportees were denied permission to land in Colombia, with Petro refusing to accept deported migrants. Defending the move, Petro said the U.S. “can’t treat Colombian migrants like criminals.” Trump responded by announcing a 25 percent tariff on all goods imported from Colombia, rising to 50 percent in a week. He also threatened financial sanctions, a travel ban, and visa revocations for all Colombian government officials plus “allies and supporters.”
“These measures are just the beginning,” Trump warned on Truth Social. “We will not allow the Colombian Government to violate its legal obligations with regard to the acceptance and return of the Criminals they forced into the United States.”
The threats were certainly noticed, with Petro announcing reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods. Still, in a sign that Trump’s tough negotiation style was working, on Sunday afternoon Petro offered his own presidential plane to “facilitate the dignified return of the compatriots who were going to arrive in the country today in the morning, coming from deportation flights.”
By the evening, the White House announced that “the Government of Colombia has agreed to all of President Trump’s terms, including the unrestricted acceptance of all illegal aliens from Colombia returned from the United States, including on U.S. military aircraft, without limitation or delay.”
The Sunday showdown was a dramatic change of pace from Joe Biden’s quiet Sundays in Delaware—and a taste of the hard bargain Trump has promised to drive on the world stage.
Martin Gurri: “The Great American Debate Begins Again”
Further evidence of the political vibe shift came 24 hours earlier.
On Saturday, the Central Intelligence Agency announced it believed “with low confidence” that the coronavirus pandemic is more likely to have resulted from a lab leak than from a natural origin.
It is quite a moment: A theory once dismissed as fringe conspiracy is now, according to U.S. intelligence officials, the most likely explanation for a pandemic that killed millions.
John Ratcliffe, the agency’s new director, told reporters it is “important for the American people to see an institution like the CIA get off the sidelines and be truthful about what our intelligence shows.”
The question of where Covid-19 came from is just one example of the many debates that have been suppressed in recent years. On a range of important topics, government officials and the media have enforced conventional wisdom—only to be caught in a lie. Remember when Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack”?
Well, now the Biden administration is gone, and with it what Martin Gurri describes as their “sustained effort to overturn the principles of the open society.” In his column for The Free Press today, Martin recounts how “The just-departed administration, of which Biden was the decrepit figurehead, tried to impose, by threat or mandate, a version of reality that brooked no discussion.”
Will the new administration be better for the open society? Martin is cautiously optimistic. On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that declared, “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.” Whether that first step is a sign of things to come might just be the most important question about Trump’s second term.
“Whether Trump’s policies turn out to be right or wrong evidently matters,” writes Martin. “But the resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian open society, matters much more, since it will enable progress.”
Read Martin Gurri’s column: “The Great American Debate Begins Again.”
The Fight to Define “America First” Foreign Policy
As the Washington truism goes, personnel is policy. When it comes to an administration’s ideological direction, nothing matters more than who the president hires and fires. And while the top jobs generate headlines, anyone who has worked in government knows that the staffing of the middle ranks of government departments matters enormously.
All of which is why the recent moves of Dan Caldwell, a man you’ve probably never heard of, are cause for “concern bordering on alarm” for many in Republican foreign policy circles. Caldwell is the head of the “landing team” at the Department of Defense, and he is stocking the Pentagon with people who share his view that the U.S. needs to dramatically reduce its military footprint abroad.
The battle over Pentagon personnel is part of a bigger fight to define “America First” foreign policy. It’s a fight that involves some of the biggest beasts in MAGA World—from Steve Bannon and Don Jr. to newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—and that will determine how America navigates a dangerous geopolitical moment.
In his report for The Free Press today, Eli Lake lifts the lid on these personnel fights—and explains what the latest appointments portend for the new administration’s foreign policy.
Read Eli on “The Fight to Define ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.”
Sarah Palin and Other Alaskans Weigh In on Renaming Mount McKinley
Among the dozens of executive actions Donald Trump took last week was an order renaming North America’s tallest mountain in Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Mount Denali is now Mount McKinley.
“All of a sudden—boom!—one of the last places in America that had been unscathed by the culture war was smack in the middle of it, with those in the Denali camp understood to be politically correct libtards and those in the McKinley camp as America First patriots rolling back cultural Marxism,” writes Peter Savodnik in his latest for The Free Press.
So how do actual Alaskans feel about the change? It’s a bit more complicated than you might think. “I have two nieces—one named McKinley, the other is Denali,” Sarah Palin told The Free Press. She loves both names, though she supports Trump’s move. Another Alaskan—Peter’s own mother-in-law—says: “We don’t like people renaming our mountains without consulting us.”
Read Peter Savodnik’s report on the Alaskan reaction to Trump’s name change.
WATCH: I Went Grocery Shopping in Moscow
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the West has placed so many sanctions on Russia that it is now the most sanctioned country in the world. Last year, Putin boasted about Russia’s economic resilience. And Tucker Carlson agreed, when he visited a Moscow grocery store a few weeks later.
But what do ordinary Russians make of that assessment? And what’s actually on the shelves these days? Reporting from Moscow, Free Press video journalist Tanya Lukyanova decided to find out.
Watch and read her report on the limited effects of the harshest economic sanctions in the world.
On Saturday, Hamas released four more Israeli hostages—Karina Ariev, Daniela Gilboa, Naama Levy, and Liri Albag—in exchange for 200 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli officials have refused to allow Palestinians to return to northern Gaza until another female hostage, Arbel Yehud, has been released. Meanwhile, President Trump resumed the shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, which had been withheld by Biden. Read Naama Levy’s mother Ayelet’s December 2023 article for The Free Press: “The Woman in the Hamas Video Is My Daughter.”
On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance addressed thousands of pro-life demonstrators gathered at the National Mall in Washington D.C., promising them that President Trump will be “the most pro-family, most pro-life American president of our lifetimes.” In a prerecorded video, Trump likewise pledged to “stand proudly for families and for life.” But the pair were light on details and suggested no policy interventions. The day before, Trump pardoned 23 anti-abortion activists prosecuted by the Biden administration for violating the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, with many having been sentenced to yearslong prison terms. “Many of them are elderly people. They should not have been prosecuted,” Trump told reporters. “This is a great honor to sign this.”
Trump affirmed his intent to annex Greenland in a recent, tense phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen. On the call, Trump threatened tariffs on Danish imports if the Scandinavian country does not acquiesce. “It was a cold shower,” one senior European official briefed on the call told the Financial Times. “Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous.”
A small Chinese AI lab has released DeepSeek R1, a large language model it produced on a shoestring budget. The results have stunned the tech world. “Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen,” said Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. The model outperforms OpenAI on a number of AI benchmarks—in spite of U.S. sanctions on the sale of advanced chips to Chinese companies.
If it feels harder than ever to buy a house, that’s because it is. Rising prices and high interest rates have made housing drastically less affordable, as this report in The Wall Street Journal makes clear: “In January 2012, the household income required to afford the typical home in the U.S. was $39,223, according to Redfin. As of November 2024, home buyers need to earn $126,764, a 223% increase.”
Justin Trudeau’s 17-year-old son is launching an R&B career, according to a promotional video he posted to Instagram this weekend. In the video, the prime minister’s son raps: “We could roll some / We could light one.” Canadian musician Dan Boeckner, best known for the band Wolf Parade, shared his thoughts on the younger Trudeau’s star turn: “I’m actually fine with this AS LONG AS Trudeau Jr Jr is formally banned from entering politics for the rest of his natural life.” Sounds like a good deal to me.
I really didn't know a president could just rename things: gulfs, mountains, sounds like pretty much anything. Of course the next D president will just undo it, but it feels like there should be a process for getting names changed.
This is the second time I've seen TFP use the portmanteau "libtards". Do I have to explain how offensive that term is? Come on!