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| By The Free Press |
It’s Tuesday, August 19. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: A Texas town renames its high school after a Confederate general. A pair of U.S.-Ukraine sister cities forge an unlikely, wholesome bond. And a look inside MAHA’s campaign against glyphosate, the pesticide America loves to hate.
But first: Melania Trump’s foreign policy.
You probably remember February 28, 2025. It had to be one of the worst days of Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency in Ukraine—and he has had a lot of bad days. He was berated at the White House by President Donald Trump and scolded by Vice President J.D. Vance, while the whole world watched on TV. Their message? Zelensky, whose country had been invaded by Russia three years earlier, was somehow the impediment to peace.
Our Eli Lake had a very different reaction to Zelensky’s return visit to the White House on Monday. “What a difference six months makes,” Eli writes in his analysis. Inside the Oval Office, it verged “on a love fest,” as Eli put it. Vance was there but kept his mouth shut. Zelensky was accompanied by half a dozen European leaders, all of whom pushed Trump to throw his full support behind Ukraine and stand up to Russian president Vladimir Putin. And the Ukrainian president shed his usual military fatigues for a modern black suit.
The European posse isn’t why Trump, who met with Putin in Alaska just three days ago, is now turning away from him and trying to broker a peace that would give Ukraine the security guarantees it needs. Rather, Eli writes, it is a combination of factors: Putin’s ongoing aggression, the declining influence of noninterventionists like Vance and—not least—the influence of Melania Trump. The First Lady even sent a letter to Putin asking him to think of the children who are dying.
—Joe Nocera
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What Ukraine Is Teaching Worcester, Massachusetts | ||||||
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The Confederacy Is Great Again at This Texas School | ||||||
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The Weedkiller Tearing Apart Trump’s Coalition | ||||||
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The Radical Right Is Coming for Our Sons The Free Press |
Rod Dreher warns that the far right is luring disillusioned young men into a cesspool of white nationalism and antisemitism under the guise of reclaiming masculinity. In this episode of Honestly, he tells Bari how we got here, why conservatives must act now to reverse this illiberal turn, and why he doesn’t like the term woke right.
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