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1 week ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
Harvard Had It Coming. That Doesn’t Mean Trump Is Right. The school is taking a stand for academic freedom. How long will it last?
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2 weeks ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
Think Congress Will Stop Trump’s Tariffs? Think Again. Trump’s tariff edicts are a sign of how far the United States’ political reality has strayed from its constitutional design. It’s been seven mind-blowing days since President Trump announced his global tariff plan on April 2—“Liberation Day,” he called it—and all of that before the steepest “reciprocal” tariffs take effect today.
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4 weeks ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
Here’s an idea: Let’s create a federally sponsored corporation to spend $89.5 billion a year moving stuff—mostly documents made of paper—from place to place. Let’s hire 635,000 people to do it, grant them expensive health and pension benefits such that personnel costs are 80 percent of the total, then make it almost impossible to lay them off. Let’s keep doing so long after the service has been rendered technologically obsolete, and demand for it has cratered.
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1 month ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
The vibe shift is powerful. But is it powerful enough to beat Big Soda and Big Grocery? Obesity and its evil twin—diabetes—are corroding America’s health. These chronic ailments also disproportionately afflict the poor.
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1 month ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
Gene Hackman’s grandfather and uncle were small-town newspaper reporters. The abusive father who abandoned Hackman when he was just 13 operated a daily’s printing press. Hackman himself dabbled in journalism school. So it figures that he would have been compelling as Alex Grazier, the worldly but ethical war correspondent at the moral center of Roger Spottiswoode’s 1983 film, Under Fire.
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2 months ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
Not only has President Donald Trump attempted multiple sweeping policy changes in fewer than a third of the proverbial first 100 days of his presidency, he is also doing so almost entirely without new legislation. That might come later. For now, he is aggressively using executive orders—66 in total, as of February 13. And he is unleashing Elon Musk’s DOGE—an entity whose own legal status is innovative, murky, or a bit of both—on federal agencies. Trump’s opponents are crying foul.
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2 months ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane |Jonathan Rosen
On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced that he has ordered his administration to cease production of the penny. The argument for the move seems straightforward enough. It costs more than a penny to make a penny (3.7 cents, according to the U.S. Mint). Given inflation and the move to digital payments, ditching the coin is just common cents, right? Not necessarily.
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2 months ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
It feels like only yesterday I called up my friend Douglas Murray with a strange idea: What if you wrote a column for us about poetry? We had no idea if anyone would be interested in it. I still wasn’t sure many people would be interested in The Free Press itself. But I knew I didn’t want this institution we were building to focus solely on what was wrong with the world.
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2 months ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
My breakfast today consisted of crow, with a side of humble pie. I’m on a restricted diet, because I’ve just been exposed as a prisoner of my pre-Trump Washington expectations. On Monday, I wrote of an impending “sudden shock” from the president’s threatened 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico.
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2 months ago | 
thefp.com | Charles Lane
Why Did Trump Just Start a Trade War with Our Neighbors? The president imposes a 25 percent tariff on Mexico and Canada—for no good reason. If the Constitution were intended to prevent anything, a sudden shock to this country’s economy, along with the disruption of long-established treaty alliances and executive agreements, delivered on one man’s say-so, would seem to be high on the list.
