It’s Tuesday, June 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Matthew Continetti looks back at Trump’s ride down that escalator exactly a decade ago; Tyler Cowen on the future of MAGA and the tech right; and much more.
But first: Another day in the war between Israel and Iran raises even more questions about what the U.S.’s role will be—and what it has been preparing for.
On Monday evening, Donald Trump ghosted the G7 summit in Canada and refused to sign a resolution calling for the de-escalation of tensions in the Israel-Iran war. And that wasn’t even the most bellicose thing that he did. He also urged everyone in Iran’s capital to evacuate Tehran on Truth Social.
Then he declared war on Tucker Carlson. “Somebody please explain to kooky Tucker Carlson that IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” said the president in a post on Truth Social.
Does this mean the U.S. is about to get more involved in Israel’s war on Iran’s nuclear program? With Trump, you never know. It might be a head fake, another threat to get Iran back to the nuclear negotiations that Trump began a little over two months ago. As I reported on Sunday evening, Iran’s foreign minister has been telling European and Gulf Arab diplomats that Iran would return to the talks that he officially left on Monday. Iran now is threatening to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The big issue right now is the crown jewel of Iran’s nuclear program, Fordow, a fortified centrifuge cascade buried deep under a mountain. As of late Monday night, Trump had not indicated whether he would join Israel and order the Air Force to drop bombs capable of burrowing deep underground. To understand the backstory of Fordow and what the U.S. and Israel have been planning for that facility, read my colleague Jay Solomon’s new story for The Free Press.
As Jay reports, U.S. officials have been planning for this war for quite some time. He brings us the exclusive background on the Washington war games in preparation for the present moment.
—Eli Lake
Five days into Israel’s campaign to destroy Iran’s nuclear arsenal, President Trump told reporters at the G7 summit that “a deal will be signed” with Iran. But later that day, he took to the Situation Room to weigh options for military intervention. So which path will he choose? We brought together two former national security officials with very different perspectives—Dan Caldwell and Simone Ledeen—to debate America’s role in the escalating conflict.
Israeli attacks on Iran have killed more than 200 people and injured more than 1,400. In Israel, at least 24 people have been killed since the conflict began. To help make sense of the escalating violence, Bari Weiss spoke with historian Niall Ferguson and war correspondent Dexter Filkins about how to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, whether or not Israel can win the war on its own, and how the conflict fits into a twenty-first-century cold war between the U.S. and China.
Ten years ago yesterday, Donald Trump debuted the slogan “Make America Great Again” as he announced he was running for president. In his latest column, Matthew Continetti takes us back to that seminal speech at Trump Tower in 2015 and traces how Trump’s ideas and rhetoric became the new political normal, despite being dismissed at first by politicians and pundits alike. “The world that dismissed Trump as an aberrant interloper is gone,” writes Continetti. “He demolished it.”
To date, the tech right and MAGA have been held together by opposition to DEI and wokeness, and by a desire to see the Democrats lose the 2024 election. But now that Trump is in office and DEI ideology is in retreat, tension between the two groups is bubbling up over other issues. First, Elon Musk and Trump fell out. What will happen next? The weaker this alliance becomes, argues Tyler Cowen in his latest column, “the more that the best of the tech right will reallocate their attention and energies away from government.”
The man suspected of killing a Minnesota legislator and wounding another was charged with murder yesterday—charges that could incur the death penalty. Vance Boelter, 57, allegedly planned to “inflict fear,” authorities say, in a serial murder campaign that would have targeted other lawmakers in the state.
At a tense G7 summit in Canada yesterday, Trump criticized the group’s 2014 decision to remove Russia from its ranks, arguing that the country’s continued membership could have helped prevent Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
A new Gallup poll revealed a significant gap in stock market optimism along partisan lines—with Democrats’ bullishness trailing Republicans’ by 59 percentage points. “If I know how people voted, I could tell you how they feel about the stock market,” one investment adviser told The Wall Street Journal.
Southwest Airlines is adding a new “blind spot monitor” tool to its fleet to help prevent runway collisions. The system, designed by Honeywell, will function similarly to blind spot monitors in late-model cars, preventing ground traffic mishaps by issuing verbal alerts and text alarms to pilots during taxi and takeoff. Read James Fallows on everything you want to know about the recent air travel snafus, but are too afraid to ask.
The Louvre unexpectedly shut its doors yesterday due to a summer visitor surge, which triggered what one union called “untenable” labor conditions. The strike broke out during a routine internal meeting, according to Christian Galani, a spokesman for a union representing the museum workers. “We didn’t plan to go on strike, but the people are so exhausted, they can’t support the conditions getting worse and worse,” Galani told The New York Times.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could run out of money as soon as next month, according to a new Axios report. With top Trump officials demanding officers arrest an unprecedented 3,000 immigrants per day, the agency tasked with carrying out Trump’s mass deportations is already $1 billion over budget with more than three months left in the fiscal year.
The Trump organization is launching a new $499 smartphone and mobile plan offering unlimited talk, text, and data for $47.45 a month. The new smartphone, announced yesterday, will feature a gold-colored metal case with an etching of an American flag.
Recent graduates are facing the highest unemployment rate since the Covid-19 pandemic—6.6 percent—due to a general slowdown in hiring across multiple industries, economists told The Wall Street Journal. Entry-level hiring is down 17 percent since April 2019, and “businesses are hunkering down,” according to one economist at jobs site Indeed.
Corporate employers have had their fill of the expensive, inept snowflakes being graduated from college these days. With government hiring severely curtailed, even the robust increase in private employment will not absorb the new graduating classes.
At this point, the reader’s score between the “restrainer” Dan Caldwell and the informed Simone Ledeen is 91% to 9% in favor of Ledeen.
Mr. Caldwell has only fake re-interpretations of Iran during the shah’s rule and fallacious logic to offer, not to mention patent absurdities like removing all US forces from the Middle East.
So far, I have not seen a single “restrainer” able to put even the slightest veneer of logic and real history on their arguments; it’s all at the Tucker Carlson’s level. The term “shitposter” seems the most appropriate, but the scary part is that this Caldwell actually works for the Administration.