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

0:02David Greene:President Trump touted the beginnings of an American revival during his State of the Union address.

0:06Amina Elahi:He talked about a turnaround for the ages in a record-length speech filled with exaggeration. Did he hit reset with Americans losing faith?

0:13David Greene:I'm Ian Martinez, that's Leila Faddle, and this is Up First from NPR News. A year into his presidency, Trump blamed Democrats for the current affordability crisis in the country in his State of the Union address. Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them. What specific plans the president lay out to bring down prices?

0:37Amina Elahi: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.

0:54Amina Elahi:Hey, it's Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. Don't miss my interview with actor Kate Hudson. We talk about her music career, motherhood, and of course, her breakout role. Penny Lane, man, show some respect. You can find my interview on the Fresh Air podcast.

1:13David Greene:I met this guy on the bar train one time, and I had my bass with me, and he goes, man, what do you want to do? What's your dream? I'm Jesse Thorn. On Bullseye, Raphael Sadiq. He's nominated for an Oscar. He played bass for Prince. And of course, he co-founded Tony, Tony, Tony. Uncle, I want to be in a band with my brother. That's on the next Bullseye. Find us in the NPR app at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts. President Trump addressed the nation last night at a critical moment in his presidency.

1:41Amina Elahi: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.

1:54David Greene:Our nation is back. Bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before. Like Republicans wanted,

2:02Amina Elahi: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.

2:15David Greene:NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordonez was up late watching the longest address ever to Congress. Franco, what stuck out to you? Yeah, 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.

2:50David Greene:men's Olympic hockey team. 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. It was really a rare bipartisan moment of applause, even a standing ovation during the speech. Now, the Supreme Court justices were sitting in front of them last week. They slapped down his tariff agenda. So I was wondering, Franco, what, if anything, he was going to say about them. 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.

3:33David Greene: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? 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.

4:06David Greene:But when it comes to the corruption that is plundering, really, it's plundering America. There's been no more stunning example than Minnesota. Members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated$19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information. And you can't really hear it so well on that tape, but Democrats started to yell out and call Trump a liar there. No, no, no. 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?

4:44David Greene: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. That's NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordonez. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Abe. NPR chief economics correspondent Scott Horsley also stayed up to hear what Trump had to say.

5:23David Greene:But, Scott, you were focusing on his message about the economy.

5:26Amina Elahi:That's right. And the president talked as if he had inherited a stagnant economy with record high inflation from the Democrats.

5:34David Greene:Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them. We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.

5:45Amina Elahi: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 push 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 percent last year. And then, of course, job growth has been much slower under this president than it was under his predecessor.

6:13David Greene:Now, did he present any new economic policies? He did.

6:16Amina Elahi: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.

6:27David Greene: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.

6:46Amina Elahi: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.

7:20David Greene: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.

7:37Amina Elahi:The Scott the president's talking to there is Treasury Secretary Scott Besant. 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.

7:55David Greene: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?

8:02Amina Elahi: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.

8:30David Greene: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.

8:47Amina Elahi: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.

8:57David Greene:That's NPR's Scott Horsley. Scott, thanks a lot.

8:59Amina Elahi:You're welcome.

9:17David Greene: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.

9:26Amina Elahi: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.

9:35David Greene:NPR transportation correspondent Joel Rose joins us now with more. Joel, what would this bill have done?

9:40Rachel Martin: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 from military helicopters. The National Transportation Safety Board says this technology could have prevented the mid-air 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.

10:20Rachel Martin:So what are some of those concerns? Why do they do that? 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.

10:50Rachel Martin:Rogers spoke against the bill on Monday evening. Here is some of what he said. This bill will undermine our national security, requiring our fighters and bombers and highly

11:00David Greene:classified assets to regularly broadcast their location puts our men and women in uniform at risk.

11:07Rachel Martin:The Rotaract'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 Airline Pilots Association, at a press conference in support of the bill before yesterday's vote.

11:29David Greene:If you're in our kind of airspace, near DCA or take New York or take anywhere, you want to operate in that airspace, you need to be telling us your position so that I don't lose crew members and these folks don't lose family members. All right.

11:41Rachel Martin:So, Joel, what happens now? 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 Rotaract 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.