Substacks

Venezuelans Are Fighting for Freedom. Plus. . . Oliver Wiseman

Published

6 months ago

July 31, 2024

(Photo by YURI CORTEZ / AFP via Getty Images)

On today’s Front Page from The Free Press: Suzy Weiss reviews class-war movie “Coup!”, the “MAGA communists” start their own party, and much more.

But first, our lead story.

On Monday, angry Venezuelans started pulling down statues of Hugo Chávez. It was one day after an election in which, if the exit polls were even close to correct, they had elected a new president in a landslide—Edmundo González Urrutia. And yet their dictator, Nicolás Maduro, has claimed victory.

Behind Urrutia is the Iron Lady of Venezuela, who has long resisted the regime. María Corina Machado is a slight, 56-year-old Yale grad born to a wealthy family. Perhaps that’s why Maduro and his people underestimated her. They considered her too white and too rich to win the majority’s support.

But after decades of inflation, starvation, corruption, and a refugee crisis that has impacted every single country in the Americas, including the United States, Venezuelans began to see María Corina as our only hope, writes Jonathan Jakubowicz, a native Venezuelan now living in the U.S. Her slogan is “hasta el final,” which translates to “until the end.” As Jonathan writes, she “knows the regime is capable of anything to stay in power,” but “unlike the opposition leaders that came before her, she will keep on fighting”—as her people will in the coming days. Read his full piece “In Venezuela, Fighting for Freedom ‘Until the End.’ ”

The Biden administration thinks the risk of all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah is “exaggerated,” according to White House spokesman John Kirby. Given the administration’s foreign policy track record, I’m starting to wonder if we’re understating the risk of a major conflict. (Axios)

Last weekend, Russian strikes killed five civilians and wounded 15 more in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine; at least eight more were injured in Nikopol and another eight civilians were wounded in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province. (VOA)

Americans are divided over whether the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine: 48 percent believe it does, and 49 percent believe it does not. Among Republicans, the majority (62 percent) believe the U.S. does not have a responsibility to help; among Democrats, the majority (63 percent) says that it does. The partisan split is clear—though perhaps not as big as some headlines suggest. (Pew)

When Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman announced he’d be backing Kamala Harris last week, he said he wanted to see her shift in a pro-business direction. Matt Stoller argues that how Harris responds “will determine whether she leads a broad coalition for economic reform” or is a “Hillary rerun.” (Compact)

The Houthis control Yemen and have written a chilling new curriculum designed to raise a generation ready for jihad. First graders practice their writing by copying the sentence “The Jews are the enemies of God.” I remember writing “The cat sat on the mat” in grade school, but different strokes, I guess. (New Lines Magazine)

A new poll suggests Squad member Cori Bush is heading for defeat in her primary next week. Moderate challenger Wesley Bell leads Bush by six points ahead of a primary, meaning she is on track to follow in Jamaal Bowman’s footsteps—another Israel critic and squad member who was successfully primaried last month. (KSDK)

“I closed my eyes. All I saw was the back of my eyelids.” Blocked and Reported co-host (and occasional TGIF pinch hitter) Katie Herzog recently discovered that she has aphantasia, meaning she has no mind’s eye. She writes about that discovery, and her quest to teach herself the ability to visualize. (Blocked and Reported)

Republican senators aren’t holding back in their attacks on Kamala Harris the presidential candidate, but they have mostly fond memories of Kamala Harris the senator and call her “smart,” “engaging,” and “personable.” In today’s no-holds-barred politics, old-fashioned Senate chumminess is strangely reassuring. (NOTUS)

A new blood test for Alzheimer’s catches 90 percent of early dementia cases, a study has found. That’s a big improvement on the 73 percent accuracy at which neurologists and other specialists correctly diagnose the disease. The new tests could “change the game in the speed in which we can conduct Alzheimer’s trials and get to the next medication.” (CNN)

UK-based Sheikh Yasser al-Habib is an Islamist leader known for extreme rhetoric and “military-style” boot camps. He and his followers are in “advanced talks” to buy Torsa, a remote isle off the west coast of Scotland. The locals’ concern about their community being transformed into a sectarian outpost is a study in British understatement. “I’ve spent much of my life working in Muslim countries so have no issues whatsoever with that community, but this group do seem alarming from what I’ve just seen now,” says one. (Daily Mail)

From Saltburn to Knives Out, manor movies are having a moment. The latest, Coup!—out this week—is less artistic and weird than the former, writes Suzy Weiss, but more serious and topical than the latter. A zippy romp, Coup! is set during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, stars Billy Magnussen and Peter Sarsgaard, and is all about how pandemics can cause an inversion of power and privilege, as blue-collar workers abruptly get labeled “essential” while the rich sit uselessly at home. Who needs escapism? Click to read Suzy’s full review of “Coup!”

→ Biden’s Supreme Court confusion: On Monday, President Biden proposed two reforms to the Supreme Court—term limits for justices and a binding ethics code—along with a constitutional amendment to its recent presidential-immunity decision. Making his case in a Washington Post op-ed, the president claimed broad support and specifically thanked “the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the [SCOTUS] for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.”

But there’s a problem with Biden trying to use the commission to give his proposals legitimacy. Adam White, who served as a member of that commission, tells The Free Press that “nothing in our report actually recommended anything” that the president is now proposing.

Imposing term limits by statute would be unconstitutional, says White, a legal scholar for the American Enterprise Institute who was one of 34 experts who delivered a report on Supreme Court reforms to Biden in 2021.

“The Constitution explicitly guarantees that justices hold their office in good behavior, which means until impeachment or death or retirement, that’s always been understood as life tenure,” he explains.

Trying to get around this by “slicing and dicing the Supreme Court into subgroups”—granting justices 18 years of “active service,” after which they no longer participate in their ordinary duties—“opens the door to Congress playing total mischief with the court,” warns White. Biden is yet to explain the details of his proposals, but any legislation he brings to Congress is likely to be dead on arrival. In fact, House Speaker Mike Johnson said as much yesterday.

White adds that it’s “incredibly important” to have high ethical standards for justices, but “any proposal by Congress to assume for itself the power to micromanage the ability of justices to decide on their own code of ethics would be an enormous breach of the Constitution’s separation of powers.”

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with Biden’s proposals—beyond, you know, being unconstitutional. —Madeleine Kearns

→ “MAGA Communism” gets its own party: The communists are arguing with one another. On July 21, a group of activists announced the launch of the American Communist Party and declared the Communist Party USA “defunct, and usurped by interests contrary to its historical existence.” The new organization boasts the support of more than thirty CPUSA clubs and cells across the country.

But there is more to this story than crusty commies splitting hairs. The vanguard of this new group is not old-school far-left types, but far-right influencers. The American Communist Party Plenary Committee is, per its long-winded “declaration,” composed of ten men. The most famous of them is 24-year-old Jackson Hinkle, a proud Hamas supporter and Putin fan with 2.7 million followers on X. He vows to liberate “America from the control of the warmongers and the corporate elite” via his leadership in the ACP. Comparing the U.S. and Russia, Hinkle posted on X that “The US celebrates ‘Pride Month’ on June 1st. America is run by pedophiles,” whereas “Russia celebrates International Day for the Protection of Children on June 1st.”

The other aspiring proletarian leaders include pro-Stalin Haz Al-Din, whose pinned X thread explains “Why Marxism is not woke”; Rev Laskaris, who proudly supports Assad and wrote that “Russia is the true defender of freedom and sovereignty”; and Eddie “Liger” Smith, a wrestler who denies that Stalin murdered millions of his own people.

The ACP is the extreme proof-of-concept for a new branch of the radical right that sticks ideas from the left and the right into a blender and comes out with something very weird—and dark. Hinkle formerly called himself a “MAGA Communist,” which he describes as “a certain level of class consciousness that is upset with the way our country’s headed.”

MAGA Communists’ policy wishlist, per an infographic shared by Hinkle, includes ending foreign wars, banning “ANTIFA Street Terrorism,” “patriotic education,” subsidized gyms, and pardoning the January 6 protesters—not to mention a goal to “Deport Bush Family, Clinton Family, Obama, Pompeo, Bolton to ICC.”

Perhaps above all else, this crowd of influencers emphasizes that they are an alternative to the mainstream political parties that serve “ZIONISTS & WARMONGERS.”

This strange new species of communist is best understood as a descendant of the “tankie”: authoritarian communists who idolized the USSR and other bloodthirsty communist projects. But the ACP’s support of Islamist terrorists and brutal dictators suggests that 2024 communism has a. . . broader coalition.

The ACP has a sleek website and strange promotional video rife with industrial motifs like trains, ships, and welders and set to techno, totalitarian-core music. All they need to do now is replace their red MAGA hats with ushankas. —Julia Steinberg

→ On a roll: After winning gold in women’s street skating Sunday, Japan just keeps rolling its competition: Monday morning, the skater Yuto Horigome cruised to his second straight gold; here he is winning Tokyo in 2021. Just a couple hours later, Japan also won gold in men’s team gymnastics. The U.S. won bronze in that event, breaking a 16-year drought on the men’s side. But Japan’s day of dominance came to a close with a crushing defeat in women’s basketball, falling to the Americans 102–76.

→ Water under the Pont Neuf: An emerging theme of Paris 2024? Burying the hatchet. Dawn Staley, coach of the South Carolina Gamecocks women’s basketball team and sitting member of the U.S. women’s basketball selection committee, said that if selections were today, she’d consider letting Caitlin Clark onto the team. The omission of Clark was big news—and in the eyes of some, a big own goal for the sport. “If we had to do it all over again, the way that she’s playing, she would be in really high consideration of making the team,” said Staley. This is four months after Staley’s team wiped the floor with Clark’s team, the Iowa Hawkeyes, in the National Championship.

Snoop Dogg, the rapper turned NBC correspondent, is also squashing his beef in Paris. While interviewing Simone Biles’ family, her mother confronted him about shrugging off a photo request in Times Square in 2010. Snoop laughed it off and offered the D.O.G.G. equivalent to an apology, pointing to an infant in Biles’ entourage: “Shout-out to the baby that’s frowning at me.”

What to watch today: At 7 a.m. EST, the U.S. men’s volleyball team, led by influencer-in-chief Erik Shoji, takes on Germany; at 12:15 p.m., Biles and co. will shoot for gold in the women’s gymnastics team final. And at 9:30 p.m., the final matchup of men’s surfing will go down in Tahiti.

And for some commercial-break reading: Get into the mathematics behind swimming, take a view on the outcry over the new, less skimpy volleyball uniforms, and read this profile of “the grand duchess of Luxembourg table tennis,” 61-year old Ni Xia Lian.
—Evan Gardner

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

To support The Free Press, become a paid subscriber today:

Subscribe now

And if you’re enjoying The Front Page, consider forwarding it to someone else you think might like it.

Substacks

The inauguration of a multi-billion dollar grift Judd Legum

Published

37 minutes ago

January 21, 2025

admin

On Monday, Donald Trump took the oath of office — the first person to be sworn in as president while simultaneously hawking an eponymous meme coin.

Trump launched $TRUMP, a crypto token, on Friday night. Meme coins are crypto tokens tied to a celebrity or joke. The first and most famous is DOGE coin, a cryptocurrency centered around a famous image of a Shiba Inu dog. $TRUMP features an image of Trump during the assassination attempt last summer.

While meme coins are nominally tied to digital “artwork,” they function primarily as a speculative asset. Since many meme coins attempt to capitalize on online trends, they are known for extreme volatility. Hailey Welch, an online personality known as the “Hawk Tuah girl,” launched the “Hawk” meme coin in December. The Hawk coin’s value exploded shortly after launch, reaching a market cap of $490 million. But the price quickly collapsed. Today, the total value of all the 999 million Hawk coins is less than $30,000. You can buy 338 Hawk coins for less than one cent.

Trump is leveraging the prestige of the presidency and the global coverage of the inauguration to boost the price of $TRUMP. By Sunday evening, the price of one $TRUMP coin soared to over $75, putting the value of the 200 million $TRUMP coins in circulation at nearly $15 billion. By Monday afternoon, $TRUMP had lost about 40% of its value.

The primary beneficiary of this speculative activity is Trump himself. In a move that raised red flags even among crypto enthusiasts, 80% of all $TRUMP coins are reserved for a company owned by Trump. At its peak, the value of these coins exceeded $50 billion, making $TRUMP, which did not exist a few days ago, the dominant source of Trump’s wealth. The $TRUMP coins owned by Trump are currently locked, meaning they cannot be sold, but will be released in tranches over the next three years.

In 2016, Trump’s net worth was estimated to be about $3 billion. Before the launch of the $TRUMP, that had increased to around $7 billion, largely due to the public listing of Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group. Truth Social loses millions of dollars every quarter and has few users, but Trump’s fans keep its stock price elevated.

So Trump has a huge financial incentive to keep the price of $TRUMP elevated until he can sell his coins. For Trump, there is nothing but upside. He received the coins for free — whatever he can sell them for will be a windfall. Trump’s supporters, however, could suffer huge financial losses. By Monday afternoon, a single $TRUMP coin cost $40. People who buy these coins looking to turn a big profit could instead find themselves with massive losses.

A vehicle for corrupt foreign influence

$TRUMP does not only create problems for reckless Trump fans. It means that the White House is for sale. Anyone seeking to curry favor with Trump — including foreign governments — now has a vehicle to transfer a virtually unlimited amount of money to Trump by driving up the price of $TRUMP coins.

As with all crypto transactions, anyone can purchase $TRUMP anonymously. The only record involves a digital wallet with no public owner. This means a foreign entity could make a large purchase of $TRUMP coins — perhaps boosting $TRUMP’s value before Trump sold some of his holdings — and no one would know. It creates an unprecedented and completely opaque method to bribe the President of the United States.

“While it’s tempting to dismiss this as just another Trump spectacle, the launch of the official Trump token opens up a Pandora’s box of ethical and regulatory questions,” Justin d’Anethan, an independent crypto analyst, told Reuters.

This week, we started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so I hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch

Crypto companies under federal investigation boost $TRUMP

Thousands of meme coins are launched every month. The failure rate for meme coins is estimated at over 97%. With so much competition, it is hard to make a significant number of people become aware of a meme coin. Trump, as the President of the United States, solves that problem. But even once people discover a meme coin, it needs to be easy to buy and sell in order to sustain interest.

It is possible to buy and sell crypto assets without an intermediary. But most people buy and sell crypto through a handful of popular exchanges, which make the process easy and allow you to use cash and other assets to fund purchases.

Exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood can greatly increase awareness and demand for a meme coin. At the same time, they are not going to list every new meme coin that is issued — especially since many of them are scams.

But Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood all have made $TRUMP available to their users, dramatically increasing the number of buyers, and sending its price higher. And they aren’t just quietly listing $TRUMP. They are promoting $TRUMP to their user base.

Improving your relationship with the president is a good idea for any business. But these companies have even stronger motivations. Coinbase is currently being prosecuted by the SEC for “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.” The SEC is also prosecuting Kraken for similar alleged activities. Robinhood has not been charged but received a “Wells Notice” from the SEC last May, indicating enforcement action is coming.

The crypto industry is reportedly hoping that, under the Trump administration, the SEC will either end their prosecutions and investigations or offer a favorable settlements.

More broadly, these companies are counting on the Trump administration to allow them to operate legally. The $TRUMP coin allows Trump to make billions from a more permissive regulatory environment. It transforms the presidency from a public trust into a tool for personal enrichment.

Substacks

Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

2 hours ago

January 21, 2025

admin

Yesterday, we saw the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaug…

Substacks

Trump’s Back. What Now? Oliver Wiseman

Published

2 hours ago

January 21, 2025

admin

It’s Tuesday, January 21. I’m Olly Wiseman and this is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. It’s good to be back.

Today we answer the big questions about the transfer of power in Washington. Among them: Will Trump fight lawfare with lawfare? Will TikTok survive? Is neoliberalism dead? Is Trump cool? Does that even matter? Are we at war with Panama now? And: that hat.

But first: the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, he did it his way. He danced onstage with the Village People the night before he took the oath of office. He moved the ceremony inside the Capitol because of the cold. He gave tech CEOs choice seating in the rotunda. And he delivered a speech that at times felt less like an inaugural address and more like a State of the Union / campaign speech mashup. Ignoring unifying inaugural speech traditions stretching back to George Washington, he trashed his political opponents and touted new policies that would bring about a “golden age.”

His proposals were a Trumpian mix of serious (action on immigration and inflation) and, well, strange. It’s the Gulf of America now, and we’re “taking back” the Panama Canal, baby!

His promised day-one executive orders included:

Declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border, unlocking federal funding for a border wall, reinstating the “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, and designating drug cartels as “global terrorists.”
Cutting regulations around oil and gas production by declaring another national emergency, this one on energy. (“We will drill, baby, drill.”)
Ending the environmental rules he calls “Biden’s electric vehicle mandate.”
Establishing an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs.
And ending the “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” (You read about Trump’s repudiation of gender ideology in the federal government first in The Free Press on Sunday.)

Later in the day, Trump signed these orders. He also pardoned members of the mob who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. Trump’s January 6 pardons went further than his closest allies appear to have anticipated. Earlier this month, J.D. Vance said that those who committed violence during the riot “obviously” should not be pardoned. But Trump has commuted the sentences of members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

Back to Trump’s speech. If there was a theme, it was that his own astonishing political comeback portends a national revival, one that he’ll deliver.

“I stand before you now as proof that you should never believe that something is impossible to do,” he said. “In America, the impossible is what we do best.”

Trump went further. His comeback, and his country’s, he claimed, weren’t just linked but were providential. Recalling the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, he said: “I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Gone was the grim “American Carnage” theme of his first inaugural speech. He spoke of the many challenges that “will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.”

It is a promise both populist and popular, a reminder of why Trump won.

It is also, as my colleague Peter Savodnik argues in his column today, the death knell of neoliberalism and the end of cool.

Here’s Peter: Trump’s critics, “the so-called progressive elites, are howling at the idea that this chump, who is so very unserious, is The One who will restore our seriousness. They miss the point. Only the brawling, bumbling ringleader of the great circus that is today’s Republican Party could break open our sclerotic overclass and lay it bare for the whole republic to see not simply its emptiness but its rot.”

Read Peter’s article, “Trump Is Uncool. And That’s a Good Thing.”

Joe Biden’s Unpardonable Last Act

Another promise Trump made was to “rebalance” the scales of justice. “The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department of our government will end,” he said in his inaugural address. This would normally sound like a partisan gripe, if it weren’t for the final presidential acts of his predecessor, writes Eli Lake in The Free Press.

Just moments earlier, Joe Biden had issued sweeping preemptive pardons for his siblings and their spouses. The outgoing president did the same for some of his successor’s high-profile opponents, including Anthony Fauci and Liz Cheney. The level of clemency is without precedent, writes Eli, and inconsistent with Biden’s 2020 promise to uphold the rule of law. Indeed, four years ago Biden expressed his concern that Trump would pardon his own political cronies.

Trump now faces a choice: continue Biden’s erosion of norms, or end the cycle of lawfare. Which will it be?

Read Eli’s full report on Biden’s final act as president—and how Trump might respond.

(Photo by Rebecca Noble via Getty Images; illustration by *The Free Press*)

TikTok on the Clock

The first big internal MAGA dustup of Trump’s second term centers on TikTok, the Chinese-owned social network. Congress passed legislation that forced either the ban or the sale of the app, but on Sunday Trump gave TikTok an eleventh-hour reprieve announcing his intent to keep the app alive for 90 days. Hours after going dark, the short-video platform blinked back on.

This was welcome news to the crowd at a TikTok-sponsored inauguration party Sunday evening. Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold was on the scene and spoke to influencers who say: “We the people are for TikTok.” Read her full dispatch here.

Meanwhile, Joe Lonsdale, a prominent Silicon Valley supporter of Donald Trump, argues that the new president’s TikTok maneuvers undermine the rule of law. Now that Congress and the Supreme Court have weighed in, it doesn’t matter what Trump thinks of the TikTok ban. “The law must take effect,” writes Joe. “Because in our republic, it is the Congress that writes the law. If President Trump disagrees, he can try to change Congress’s mind.”

Read Joe Lonsdale’s op-ed: “Mr. President, Don’t Abandon the Rule of Law to Save TikTok.”

Melania Trump, wearing a hat, looks on during the inaugural parade inside Capital One Arena. (Jim Watson via Getty Images)

Fashion Police: Inauguration Edition

Okay, now the important stuff: the outfits. Suzy Weiss answers some of the really pressing inauguration questions: How did Melania pull off a hat that obscured half her face? Was there a hidden message in Trump’s choice of tie? And Lauren Sanchez’s white lace corset under a blazer: inappropriate or awesome? (Answer: both.) Read Suzy’s full fashion report here.

(Of course, the best-dressed crowd in D.C. this past weekend came to the party we threw. Read about that here.)

More Notes on the Inauguration. . .

Did the inauguration really need to be inside? Freezing temperatures forced proceedings indoors for the first time in forty years. But America’s ruling class wasn’t always so sensitive. As my colleague Chuck Lane points out, yesterday’s weather, frigid as it was, couldn’t hold an icicle to the 30-below wind chill at Ulysses S. Grant’s second inauguration on March 4, 1873. Chuck describes the frosty scene at that evening’s inaugural ball, held in a hangar-like temporary pavilion, in his book The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court, and the Betrayal of Reconstruction: “Dignitaries gamely shuffled across the dance floor in their overcoats, as horn and tuba players squeaked out music through the frozen valves of their instruments. Dozens of birdcages dangled from the ceiling; the canaries inside were supposed to accompany the orchestra. But the cold was so intense that the birds shivered, tucked their beaks under their wings, and then began to drop dead.”
In the beginning—i.e., last Friday—there was the $TRUMP meme coin. It’s kinda sorta like Bitcoin, only Trumpier. On the day it was issued, as traders anticipated the new president’s inauguration, it rose from $10 to $75, giving it a total value of more than $10 billion—billions, we should point out, backed by nothing but Trump’s considerable celebrity. It was yet another signal that his administration would embrace crypto. Then came the $MELANIA meme coin. Weirdly, its arrival caused the $TRUMP coin to drop down to $40. Then $TRUMP rose again in anticipation of the inauguration. Then, both the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins fell by 30 percent as he gave his inaugural address. Strange. Or maybe not. The volatility of meme coins is a given—that’s kinda the point for traders—and anticipation is always a more powerful driver than the actual event. What does the future hold for $TRUMP and $MELANIA? Probably more extreme volatility. But maybe people will figure out the coins’ value is built on air and they’ll collapse—at which point, maybe the president might decide to regulate crypto after all.

Indicted New York mayor Eric Adams ditched MLK Day celebrations in his city to attend the president’s inauguration. It’s the latest act of Adams’ MAGA charm offensive, which has included a trip to Mar-a-Lago and a shift in his position on immigration, saying he is open to a rollback of sanctuary city policies. Many speculate Adams—who faces federal bribery and fraud charges—is angling for a pardon. Whatever Adams’ next chapter, his eyebrows will still be flawless.
Carrie Underwood improvised an a cappella performance of “America the Beautiful” after technical difficulties nixed her backing track. “You know the words—help me out here,” the country singer said, before launching into the patriotic anthem. . . and nailing it.