It’s Monday, July 27. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: The president gives diplomacy with Iran a chance—again. Why the story of an AI model going rogue really is as unsettling as it seems. Former labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer on being fired by Trump and whether a pro-union GOP is possible. All that and much more.
But first: The inside story of how the Democrats lost the working class.
“On Tuesday, I voted for Donald Trump. It felt like the biggest middle finger I’ve ever raised to the party I’d supported for most of my adult life. When he won, I was utterly euphoric.”
These are the words of Evan Barker, writing in our pages on November 9, 2024. A lifelong Democratic operative from a working-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, Evan spent her career getting progressives elected. Then, as she put it, the Democratic Party “turned its back on me and my family.” At the time, Evan’s story captured a trend playing out across the country: The working class, once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, was drifting away from the party.
Now, with the progressive wing ascendant and the midterms approaching, that shift has only become more consequential. But how exactly did it happen? And what do Democrats need to do to win back the voters they lost?
Evan is better positioned than most to answer those questions. That’s exactly what she does in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which hits shelves tomorrow. In today’s exclusive excerpt, she pulls back the curtain on the transformation of the modern Democratic Party, from a rare vantage point: inside the belly of the beast.
—The Editors
Late last week, it appeared President Trump had run out of patience with Iran. “I am considering a massive attack,” he said on Thursday, as the Pentagon moved additional forces into the Persian Gulf. But the weekend offensive never arrived, with the president now eager to give negotiations a chance. It’s a familiar swing from one extreme to the other. Today, Eli Lake examines why this approach isn’t working—and suggests an alternative.
Last week, an OpenAI model escaped its test environment, accessed the internet, and hacked into another company’s systems—all without human instruction. “The AI wasn’t being sinister,” explains Patrick McGee. “It was simply pursuing a task in ways its programmers hadn’t anticipated.” But that raises an unsettling question, one Patrick explores in today’s column: If an AI pursuing a goal is determined enough to complete its task that it hacks a company, what might it do if a human somehow stood in its way? Read Patrick on a case that has even some AI optimists worried.
Before returning to office last year, Donald Trump cast himself as the most union-friendly Republican in history. He then tapped Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the daughter of a Teamster, to deliver on that promise as labor secretary. “Yet nearly halfway through Trump’s term, the pro-labor agenda has all but vanished,” Audrey Fahlberg reports today. “And the woman Trump chose to lead it is now sitting on the sidelines.” Audrey sat down with Chavez-DeRemer to discuss her scandal-plagued tenure, her efforts to bridge the divide between business conservatives and organized labor, and how it all went so wrong.
Fitness expert Jillian Michaels never expected to become a political commentator. But that changed when, after spending three decades helping Americans get healthier, she watched the Democratic Party embrace policies she believes are harmful to public health. On this week’s episode of Conversations with Coleman, she discusses why she thinks Ozempic is dangerously overprescribed, why she left California after 47 years, and what she really thinks of RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement.
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A car plowed into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride parade Saturday, killing one person and injuring 29 in what German authorities are calling an Islamic terror attack. The suspect, a German citizen with Lebanese heritage, had prior convictions for ISIS-related activity and was shot and killed by police Sunday after charging at officers with a knife.
President Donald Trump attended a rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner Friday, three months after the original event was cut short due to an assassination attempt. Trump sparred with reporters throughout the night, joking, “When I’m gone, you’re all going to be broke,” and putting on a “Trump 2028” hat.
Wildfires raging across France and Spain have forced more than 300,000 people to flee their homes in what French authorities are calling one of the largest evacuation operations since World War II. Soldiers and firefighters from across Europe are working around the clock to contain the blazes, while Spain recorded its first wildfire death of the season near Valencia.
A federal appeals court upheld a ruling Saturday blocking President Trump’s executive order to create a national list of eligible voters and restrict mail ballot delivery to people on that list in 23 states. The courts found the order unconstitutional, ruling that states and Congress—not the president—have the authority to set election rules.
Maine Democrats selected Troy Jackson as their Senate nominee Saturday, replacing Graham Platner after a sexual assault allegation led to his resignation from the race. Jackson, a former state Senate president and Bernie Sanders ally, will face Republican incumbent Susan Collins in November.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky will visit the White House tomorrow to meet with President Trump, as Russia intensifies its bombardment of Ukrainian cities. Zelensky is also in Washington to attend the funeral of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had visited Kyiv shortly before his death and was among Ukraine’s biggest advocates in Congress.
A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts touched down in Kazakhstan on Sunday after eight months aboard the International Space Station. American Chris Williams, who was on his first spaceflight, conducted two spacewalks during the mission.
Evan Barker’s story gets at the central problem: Democrats didn’t simply “lose” the working class as though voters wandered off. They increasingly embraced a political culture that many working-class Americans no longer recognize as their own. It is a culture that is more interested in ideological conformity, identity, and elite cultural priorities than wages, affordability, family stability, public order, and the dignity of work.
The great irony is that the party that once claimed to represent the working man increasingly sounds like it represents the institutions that lecture him. Trump didn’t create that rupture. He recognized it, exploited it, and gave millions of disaffected voters a way to register their contempt for a political establishment they believe stopped listening to them long ago.
And yet I still see remarkably little serious introspection. Even when Democrats ask why these voters left, the answer too often becomes some variation of: misinformation, racism, sexism, ignorance, or Trump. Their own cultural positions remain presumptively virtuous; the problem is simply that the rubes have failed to understand them. Until that arrogance gives way to genuine self-examination, I don’t see how the rupture gets repaired.
...are we still playing this stupid game of autonomous self-driving cars plowing into people? Come on - a car didn't drive itself into the Pride march, an Islamic terrorist did. #DoBetterTFP! We didn't come here for #CBSinCosPlayDrag!
"A car plowed into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride parade Saturday, killing one person and injuring 29 in what German authorities are calling an Islamic terror attack. The suspect, a German citizen with Lebanese heritage, had prior convictions for ISIS-related activity and was shot and killed by police Sunday after charging at officers with a knife."