Happy Monday! After a busy weekend of games—including Auburn’s memorable victory over Michigan State to advance to the Final Four—Chestbrockwell1967 and J. Fuqua are tied for first place in the TMD pool, followed by RedRaiderDad51, travbradburn, and romann233. We wish we had thought to pick the four No. 1 seeds to advance!
Our Dispawtch bracket has also entered its own Final Four. Who will take home the inaugural championship: Tesi, Meeko, Gus, or Molly? Cast your vote for today!
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- More than 1,700 people have died as a result of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Burma on Friday, the country’s ruling junta said Sunday. In Thailand, where the strong tremors caused the collapse of high-rise buildings, at least 18 people have died. The death tolls are expected to rise significantly as rescue teams continue to search the rubble in both countries. International aid groups arrived in Burma over the weekend in an effort to stave off a humanitarian crisis in the impoverished Southeast Asian nation, which in recent years has reeled from an ongoing civil war following the 2021 military coup. On Saturday, Burma’s main armed opposition group declared a two-week ceasefire in an effort to ensure aid shipments to areas of the country under its control.
- Hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in cities across Turkey on Saturday night to call for the release of jailed opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu, the chief political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The ousted Istanbul mayor was arrested pending a trial on corruption charges earlier this month, days before being named the presidential nominee of the country’s Republican People’s Party last week. Turkish authorities have detained nearly 2,000 people—including several journalists—in the ongoing demonstrations, which began following İmamoğlu’s initial arrest nearly two weeks ago. Police have also used pepper spray, water cannons, and tear gas in an effort to disperse the mass protests, while Erdoğan denounced the pro-democracy rallies as “street terrorism.”
- The Israeli military carried out airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Beirut on Friday, the country’s first attack on the Lebanese capital since November. The operation came in response to Friday rocket fire on the northern Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, one of the communities whose residents have begun to return home after being evacuated for more than a year. The Israeli airstrikes also targeted the Iranian-backed terrorist group’s command centers, rocket launchers, and fighters in multiple locations across southern Lebanon. The resumption of cross-border attacks risks upending a November ceasefire agreement between Israel and Lebanon.
- The Taliban on Thursday released Faye Hall, an American woman who had been held in Afghanistan since February. Hall, who was arrested on charges of using a drone without authorization, is the fourth American to be freed from Afghanistan since January. The Taliban released George Glezmann, a Delta Air Lines mechanic, earlier this month after more than two years. On Wednesday, the U.S. lifted millions of dollars of bounties on three leaders of the Taliban’s Haqqani network, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.
- Vice President J.D. Vance visited Greenland on Friday amid President Donald Trump’s push to annex the Danish territory. Vance focused on security and economic development during the trip, promising to “respect [the] sovereignty” of the Arctic island should it pursue independence from Denmark. However, Trump appeared to contradict the vice president a day later, telling NBC News that the U.S. would “get Greenland.” Meanwhile, on Sunday, Greenland Prime Minister Jens Frederik Nielsen rejected the American president’s remarks: “Let me make this clear: The U.S. is not getting that. We don’t belong to anyone else. We decide our own future.”
- Someone set fire to the entryway of the Republican Party headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Sunday in what authorities believe was a deliberate act of arson. In addition to the fire, the words “ICE = KKK” were spray-painted on the building. “This horrific attack, fueled by hatred and intolerance, is a direct assault on our values, freedoms, and our right to political expression,” the New Mexico GOP said in a statement. The fire followed a series of recent arson incidents targeting Tesla vehicles from Kansas City, Missouri, to Toulouse, France.
- President Trump announced Friday that Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—a prominent New York-based law firm—had agreed to provide more than $100 million in pro bono legal services in support of several Trump administration initiatives. The move, which Trump described as “essentially a settlement,” allowed Skadden to sidestep the president’s campaign of executive orders targeting five other top law firms so far. Also on Friday, two federal judges issued temporary restraining orders halting the implementation of parts of Trump’s orders singling out the firms Jenner & Block and WilmerHale. Earlier this month, a federal judge temporarily barred Trump from executing parts of a separate order targeting the Perkins Coie law firm.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent a memo to members of the department’s leadership on Friday giving them until April 11 to submit proposals to “realign” the size of the Pentagon’s civilian workforce. Hegseth said the move, which reopened the deferred resignation program and offered early retirements to all “eligible personnel,” aims to “reduce duplicative efforts and reject excessive bureaucracy.” Last month, the Trump administration announced plans to cut the Pentagon’s 950,000-employee civilian workforce by 5 to 8 percent.
- The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, increased 2.5 percent year-over-year in February, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Friday—the same annual rate from one month earlier. After stripping out more volatile food and energy prices, core PCE increased at a 2.8 percent annual rate in February, exceeding economists’ expectations. Consumer spending, meanwhile, grew 0.4 percent last month—a smaller-than-expected increase.
Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Looms
In a December 2018 Twitter thread criticizing China for its unfair trade practices, President Donald Trump declared himself “a Tariff Man.” But back then, the conventional wisdom was that this sort of tough talk was all bark and no bite. Trump implemented a series of tariffs during his first term, but the duties represented a significantly pared-back version of the trade war he had initially envisioned.
Now, as the president promises to enact sweeping tariffs on a range of U.S. trade partners this week, gone are any assurances that Trump’s threats are mostly bluster. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced plans to impose 25 percent duties on foreign cars and car parts, effective April 3 at 12:01 a.m. ET. He has also vowed to correct trade imbalances through so-called reciprocal tariffs on goods from multiple countries, dubbing April 2 “Liberation Day,” when Americans will be freed from the yoke of purportedly abusive foreign trade practices.
Facing fewer political obstacles, armed with a more energized and ideologically aligned administration, and unconcerned with re-election (recent third-term talk notwithstanding), Trump’s dream of revitalizing American manufacturing may be getting its first crash test (pun intended). And early indicators are not looking good, as American firms brace for ...
As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. You can read our 1,539-word item on Trump’s threatened tariffs in the members-only version of TMD.
Today’s Must-Read
During a career that lasted seven decades, Frank Lloyd Wright totally revolutionized architecture, spurning the Neo-Classicism that the upper classes had decreed to be official “good taste” in the 1890s, and offering instead a style that was at once futuristic and welcoming. He became not only the greatest architect in American history, but the only one many Americans today can immediately name. Wright agreed with 17th-century English architect Sir Christopher Wren that a nation’s values are reflected in its buildings, and that buildings can, in turn, shape the public’s social and political attitudes. But where the monarchist Wren believed in using architecture to propagandize about tradition and authority, Wright aimed to do the opposite.
Toeing the Company Line
Commanding His Own Reality
The Unitary Theory of Donald Trump is that Trump isn’t that hard to figure out.
Hindu Nationalism Is Not India’s Version of Christian Nationalism
If Christian nationalism is about christianizing the nation, Hindu nationalism is more about nationalizing the Hindus.
Elimination of Economic Advisory Groups Raises Alarms
The Trump administration is ending input from experts that enhances the accuracy of federal statistics.
Trump’s ‘Iron Dome for America,’ Explained
The nation’s size makes implementation of such a missile defense system difficult and costly.
To Gen Z, Emotions Are Kinky
Traditional romance is back. But there’s a twist.
Laughing on the Right
How comedians, podcasters, and internet trolls helped Donald Trump retake the White House.
The Monthly Mailbag With James P. Sutton
Our TMD reporter answers your questions.
National Security Used To Be a Thing
‘I reserve the right to be Jeff Goldberg.’
On Mobs and Mobsters
It will keep getting stupider.
Trump’s Deportations Are ‘Performance Art
Plus: The former ambassador’s reaction to the Signal saga.
Worth Your Time
- On Sunday, several freed Israeli hostages, including Yarden Bibas—whose wife Shiri and two young sons, Kfir and Ariel, were murdered in Hamas captivity in November 2023—sat down for wide-ranging interviews with CBS News’ Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes.” During the conversations, the former abductees recounted the extreme physical and psychological abuse they endured at the hands of their terrorist captors. “They were all murdered in cold blood, bare hands,” Bibas said of his family members. “[Hamas] used to tell me, ‘Oh, doesn’t matter. You’ll get a new wife. Get new kids. Better wife. Better kids.” Another hostage, Israeli-American Keith Siegel, recalled living in tunnels with sparse food or water. “The terrorists became very mean and very cruel and violent. Much more so. They were beating me and starving me,” he said. “They would often eat in front of me and not offer any food. … I felt that I was completely dependent on the terrorists, that my life relied on them—whether they were going to give me food, bring me water, protect me from the mobs that would lynch me.”
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently shared a short story produced by artificial intelligence, claiming his company had trained “a new model that is good at creative writing.” For The Drift Substack, Max Norman walked through the 1,200-word story with the eyes of a literary reviewer—and his appraisal was not generous. “Altman wrote that the model ‘got the vibe of metafiction so right.’ But that’s like saying that Trump Tower gets the vibe of Versailles so right. … The narrator declares itself to be ‘a democracy of ghosts’—an evocative phrase, and one lifted straight from [Vladimir] Nabokov’s Pnin. This fossil of human, and copyrighted, writing is perhaps the only interesting metafictional moment in the piece,” Norman wrote. “For humans, imitation and originality often go hand in hand. Good writers match their mastery of language and form, learned in part by studying their predecessors, with a mastery of observation and feeling. The former without the latter can only yield cliché: prose unenlivened by uniquely real experience. As literature, this story is dead on arrival.”
Presented Without Comment
New York Times: Trump Says He’s ‘Not Joking’ About Seeking a Third Term in Defiance of Constitution
President Trump did not rule out seeking a third term in office on Sunday, telling NBC News that he was “not joking” about the possibility and suggesting there were “methods” to circumvent the two-term limit laid out in the Constitution.
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On Sunday, after the release of the interview, the White House reiterated Mr. Trump’s point that he was focused on his current term, and added that it was “far too early to think about” the idea.
“Americans overwhelmingly approve and support President Trump and his America First policies,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said in a statement.
Also Presented Without Comment
New York Times: California Governor Newsom Says the Democratic Brand Is ‘Toxic’
Also Also Presented Without Comment
People: RFK Jr. Mercilessly Fat Shames West Virginia Governor at Live Joint Appearance
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in West Virginia on Friday, March 28, to discuss the state’s health initiatives—but also made a few rude remarks at Governor Patrick Morrisey’s expense.
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“I said to Governor Morrisey the first time I saw him, I said, ‘You look like you ate Governor Morrisey,’” Kennedy recalled. “There was a lot of talk about getting healthy again, and I’m very happy that he’s invited me to be his personal trainer,” he said before the crowd laughed.
In the Zeitgeist
The first new Mumford & Sons album since 2018 was released on Friday—and it was worth the wait. Here’s the lead single, “Rushmere.”
