Up First briefing: Trump's State of the Union; ROTOR Act; Pete Hegseth - NPR

Trump Delivers State Of The Union, Economic Focus, Aviation Safety Bill

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A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

President Trump touted the beginnings of an American revival during his State of the Union address.

LEILA FADEL, HOST:

He talked about a turnaround for the ages in a record-length speech filled with exaggeration. Did he hit reset with Americans losing faith?

MARTÍNEZ: I'm A Martínez. That's Leila Fadel, and this is UP FIRST from NPR News.

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MARTÍNEZ: A year into his presidency, Trump blamed Democrats for the current affordability crisis in the country in his State of the Union address.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them.

MARTÍNEZ: What specific plans did the president lay out to bring down prices?

FADEL: And a bipartisan aviation safety bill failed to advance in Congress after the Pentagon withdrew its support. So why did the military reject it? Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.

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MARTÍNEZ: President Trump addressed the nation last night at a critical moment in his presidency.

FADEL: During an almost two-hour State of the Union address, Trump was using a fair bit of exaggeration. He painted a nation that's in the early stages of a historic economic boom, though polls show most Americans disagree.

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TRUMP: Our nation is back - bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.

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FADEL: Like Republicans wanted, Trump focused much of his speech on the economy and affordability. He couldn't resist attacking political foes, though, calling Democrats crazy and blaming them for everything from rising health care costs to corruption without evidence.

MARTÍNEZ: NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez was up late watching the longest address ever to Congress. Franco, what stuck out to you?

FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Yeah, A. You know, I was struck by how much he stuck to the script, at least in the first hour of the address, which is really important because it's when the speech has its most viewers. You know, Trump, as you noted, hit at all the notes the Republicans wanted him to hit on the economy, housing costs, energy costs, drug prices. And, of course, ever the showman, Trump staged some key moments, you know, presenting the Medal of Honor to a 100-year-old veteran and trotting out the U.S. men's Olympic hockey team.

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TRUMP: Here with us tonight is a group of winners who just made the entire nation proud, the men's gold medal Olympic hockey team. Come on in.

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ORDOÑEZ: It was really a rare bipartisan moment of applause. Even a standing ovation during the speech.

MARTÍNEZ: Now, the Supreme Court justices were sitting in front of him. Last week, they slapped down his tariff agenda. So I was wondering, Franco, if - what, if anything, he was going to say about them.

ORDOÑEZ: Yeah. Trump called the Supreme Court's ruling unfortunate and totally wrong, but he didn't actually get personal with the justices as he did last week. He actually even stopped to shake each of their hands as he walked in the room, which is, you know, quite the deliberate choice.

MARTÍNEZ: Now, last year, during his congressional address, Democrats were criticized for holding up paddles with protest messages on them. So what kind of a pushback did he get this year?

ORDOÑEZ: Well, at the very beginning, Congressman Al Green was escorted from the chamber for displaying a sign that read, Black people aren't apes, which, of course, is a clear reference to the racist video that Trump posted about the Obamas. But there were no paddles. Some Democrats chose to boycott, and you could see the empty seats. And there was some vitriol thrown back and forth when Trump spoke of immigration and accusations of fraud.

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TRUMP: When it comes to the corruption that is plundering - really, it's plundering America - there's been no more stunning example than Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information.

UNIDENTIFIED POLITICIAN: Liar.

ORDOÑEZ: And you can't really hear it so well on that tape, but Democrats started to yell out and call Trump a liar there.

MARTÍNEZ: No, no, no. I was - I heard that for sure at the end there. Now, Franco, the U.S. might be on the verge of taking military action against Iran. Did he make a case to the American people for why this might be necessary?

ORDOÑEZ: Well, he spent more time on hockey and the other staged moments. But near the end, he did speak of the Iranian regime killing thousands of protesters, you know, their nuclear ambitions and the threat that they may present building missiles that, he said at least, will be soon able to reach the United States. But it wasn't really any new rationale for the strikes, which is concerning to a lot of Americans, including Republicans, who were worried about the U.S. being drawn into a long and complicated conflict.

MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez. Thanks a lot.

ORDOÑEZ: Thanks, A.

MARTÍNEZ: NPR chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley also stayed up to hear what Trump had to say. But, Scott, you were focusing on his message about the economy.

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: That's right. And the president talked as if he had inherited a stagnant economy with record-high inflation from the Democrats.

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TRUMP: Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them. We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.

HORSLEY: Trump is trying to paint himself as some sort of turnaround artist here, but this just does not comport with the facts. Inflation has mostly moved sideways under President Trump, and in fact, his tariff policies pushed prices higher in some cases. GDP growth has actually slowed a little bit from the last year of the Biden administration, although it was pretty respectable at 2.2% last year. And then, of course, job growth has been much slower under this president than it was under his predecessor.

MARTÍNEZ: Did he present any new economic policies?

HORSLEY: He did. He talked about how half of all working Americans don't have a retirement plan right now where their bosses can contribute to match what they put in. So he says he wants to come up with a new type of plan.

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TRUMP: To remedy this gross disparity, I'm announcing that next year, my administration will give these often forgotten American workers - great people, the people that built our country - access to the same type of retirement plan offered to every federal worker. We will match your contribution with up to $1,000 each year.

HORSLEY: Now, of course, that would take help from Congress, and he didn't talk about where the money would come from. Trump also doubled down on his tariff policies just days after the Supreme Court had struck down about half of his import levies. Of course, he did so with some of the justices who ruled against him in that case sitting right in front of him. He also said that even with some of those tariffs now outlawed, the trade deals with other countries that he managed to negotiate using those tariffs aren't going anywhere because he says those countries are afraid of getting an even worse deal later.

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TRUMP: But the good news is that almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made - right, Scott? - knowing that the legal power that I, as president, have to make a new deal could be far worse for them.

HORSLEY: The Scott the president's talking to there is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. We have actually yet to see a lot of dividends from those trade deals. U.S. exports were up only marginally last year. Farm exports were down, and the overall trade deficit barely budged from 2024.

MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. And, Scott, I know that he is not a big fan of the word affordability. Did he say anything about affordability in the State of the Union?

HORSLEY: He did. He listed a few items where prices have come down, notably eggs and gasoline. He didn't dwell on things that have gotten more expensive, like natural gas and electricity. One of the things that's driving high electricity prices these days is increased demand from data centers. And Trump did say he has a plan to make tech companies building all those data centers cover the cost of that power so it's not borne by local ratepayers. He called that the ratepayer protection pledge.

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TRUMP: We're telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs. They can build their own power plants as part of their factory so that no one's prices will go up, and in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community, and very substantially down.

HORSLEY: Now, he was short on specifics, but this does address a real political liability. Electricity prices were up more than 6% in the last year, more than double the overall rate of inflation.

MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR's Scott Horsley. Scott, thanks a lot.

HORSLEY: You're welcome.

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MARTÍNEZ: The House of Representatives has narrowly rejected a bipartisan aviation safety bill that was written after the deadly midair collision near Washington, D.C., last year.

FADEL: Yeah. The bill has the support of safety investigators and families of the crash victims, but just before the vote, the Pentagon withdrew its support.

MARTÍNEZ: NPR transportation correspondent Joel Rose joins us now with more. Joel, what would this bill have done?

JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Yeah. It's called the ROTOR Act, and it would require wider use of a safety system known as ADS-B In and ADS-B Out, which can transmit an aircraft's location to other aircraft. It would also limit exemptions for military helicopters. The National Transportation Safety Board says this technology could have prevented the midair collision of a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger jet that killed 67 people by giving the pilots more warning, more time to react and avoid the crash. The bill also has wide support from families of the crash victims, and for a while, it appeared to have the support of the Pentagon until Monday, when the Pentagon abruptly raised concerns about the bill less than a day before a key vote in the House.

MARTÍNEZ: So what are some of those concerns? Why'd they do that?

ROSE: Well, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that the bill could create, quote, "unresolved budgetary burdens and operational security risks," unquote, though he did not specify what those risks are. Whatever the concerns, they had not surfaced before because the Pentagon was on the record backing this bill when it passed the Senate unanimously back in December. But since then, the bill has run into opposition in the House from several powerful Republicans, including Mike Rogers of Alabama, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Rogers spoke against the bill on Monday evening. Here is some of what he said.

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MIKE ROGERS: This bill will undermine our national security. Requiring our fighters and bombers and highly classified assets to regularly broadcast their location puts our men and women in uniform at risk.

ROSE: The ROTOR Act's backers say the bill does have exceptions for classified missions but that military aircraft should be transmitting their position when they are flying training missions, like what led to the collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, or DCA. Here's Jason Ambrosi, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, at a press conference in support of the bill before yesterday's vote.

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JASON AMBROSI: If you're in our kind of airspace near DCA or take New York or take anywhere, if you want to operate in that airspace, you need to be telling us our - your position so that I don't lose crew members and these folks don't lose family members.

MARTÍNEZ: All right. So, Joel, what happens now?

ROSE: Well, the GOP committee chairs in the House have their own bipartisan safety bill that they are pushing. It's known as the ALERT Act, but it does not have the backing of safety investigators at the NTSB, who say it would not go far enough to close loopholes and to truly require this safety technology everywhere that it needs to be. The ROTOR Act sponsors say they will keep pushing for another vote in the House. They note that a significant majority of the representatives voted in favor, but under the fast-track rules in the House the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass and came up just a few votes short. Really a heartbreaking moment for the ROTOR Act's backers. It's not totally clear what will happen next, but this could set the stage for a clash inside the Republican Party between Ted Cruz of Texas, the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and co-author of the ROTOR Act, and some powerful committee chairs on the House side.

MARTÍNEZ: All right. That's NPR transportation correspondent Joel Rose. Joel, thanks.

ROSE: You're welcome.

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MARTÍNEZ: And that's UP FIRST for Wednesday, February 25. I'm A Martínez.

FADEL: And I'm Leila Fadel. Today's episode of UP FIRST was edited by Rebekah Metzler, Rafael Nam, Russell Lewis, HJ Mai and Adriana Gallardo. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange, and our supervising producer is Michael Lipkin. Join us again tomorrow.

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