Trump's Racist Somali Remarks, Signalgate Report, CDC Vaccine Meeting

0:01President Trump has offered two days of racist rambles about Somali Americans, specifically targeting a Minnesota lawmaker, Ilhan Omar. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These are people that work. What's behind Trump's latest tirade? I'm Steve Inskeep with Michelle Martin, and this is Up First from NPR News. Defense Secretary Pete Hankseth is under scrutiny. A Pentagon inspector general says his March signal chat regarding military plans in Yemen violated the rules and may have put U.S. troops at risk. So how does the White House respond? And CDC vaccine advisors meet today with a new chair and a new agenda after Robert F.

0:41Kennedy Jr. replaced the entire panel. They're considering rolling back recommendations that doctors have followed for decades. Stay with us. We'll give you news you need to start your day.

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1:39Plus save on cold medications, decongestants, and more. Easily compare prescription prices and find discounts up to 80%. GoodRx is not insurance, but works with or without it and could beat your copay price. Save on cold and flu prescriptions at GoodRx.com slash upfirst. For two days in a row, President Trump has gone on racist tirades against the Somali community in Minnesota. The Somalians should be out of here. They've destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain. In a ramble that went on for several minutes on Wednesday, the president complained about Somalis as a group, including many citizens who employ him.

2:19Trump talked about deporting Ilhan Omar, a U.S. citizen who is a member of Congress. In the middle of his discussion, he threw in mention of President Obama, although he did not specify what he thought Obama and Somalis have in common. The president was responding to a question about the previous day when he also rambled for several minutes about Somalis. We're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She's garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren't people that work. These aren't people that say, let's go, come on, let's make this place great.

2:52The two days of remarks, so far, began when a reporter asked about a fraud investigation in Minnesota, where some Somalis, among others, were convicted of defrauding social service programs. And P.S. Mara Lyson is here to tell us more about all this. Good morning, Mara. Good morning. So, you know, Mara, we've heard Trump target immigrant groups before, from the first day of his first campaign for president, in fact. But calling an entire community of people garbage, I mean, is there something different here? Yes. I think even by Trump's standards of nativism and xenophobia, these attacks were pretty harsh.

3:27Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has been one of Trump's favorite targets for quite some time. He belittled her on social media recently saying she's, quote, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab. He's told her to go back where she came from even though she's an American citizen. And this does come, as you say, at a time when there's this big financial scandal in Minnesota. federal prosecutors have convicted or indicted dozens of people for defrauding social services funding totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Minnesota Public Radio. Most of those convicted are of Somali descent. The vast majority of Somalis in the Minneapolis region are U.S.

4:02citizens, but the situation has provided the chance for Trump to attack Omar and the entire Somali community, and here's what he said. They contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don't want him in our country, I'll be honest with you. So let me just say here that there's no evidence of what he said is accurate. But having said that, what do you think he gains from this? I think this has been a tried and true tactic for him over the last 10 years, these nativist attacks. I think they attract attention. They can distract from problems he's having. You know, he denigrated Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.

4:40during the 2024 campaign, he and J.D. Vance repeated false rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. Could it be that he's also lashing out because he's frustrated? I mean, his approval ratings are low. He has not achieved a number of the things that he claimed he was going to achieve, including peace in Ukraine, etc. And I just wonder if this is part of the way he reacts to situations where he's not doing well. I think that's right. His approval ratings are low. His base is solid, but independents give him a 25 percent approval rating and Republicans are going to need those independent voters in the 2026 elections.

5:15Maybe they would rather have him bring prices down than attack immigrants. So we don't know whether this is going to continue. As we mentioned, this has gone on for a couple of days now. The president is meeting with some African leaders today. How do you think that's going to go? Well, they're not from Somalia. They're from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. They're here to sign a U.S. brokered peace deal. Trump is taking credit for solving the conflict between these two countries, and he's adding this to a long list of wars he claims to have ended. It's all part of him making the case for why he should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

5:48That is NPR's Mara Eliasson. Mara, thank you. You're welcome.

5:59At the start of this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced intense scrutiny over a U.S. attack on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean. Now an investigation criticizes the way that Hegseth shared highly sensitive attack plans for airstrikes against Yemen back in March. That was the attack that Hegseth discussed in a group chat that included the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. And here national security correspondent Greg Myrie is covering this, and he's with us now. Good morning, Greg, to you. Hi, Michelle. So where is this new report coming from? Yeah, this report comes from the Pentagon's inspector general, who says Hegseth risked endangering U.S.

6:35troops by using the Signal messaging app to share military plans before the first attack in Yemen. Now, NPR has not seen the report, but we've been in touch with people who have, and they've described it on condition of anonymity. The report says Hegseth shared information labeled secret as he described details of the U.S. bombing campaign that was just about to begin against the Houthis in Yemen. This report, which is expected to be released publicly today, says Hegseth violated Pentagon rules by using a personal phone for official business. And would you remind us, who was Hegseth sharing this information with?

7:13Yeah, he was in contact with essentially all top national security officials, the CIA director, director of national intelligence, the national security advisor, the secretary of state. And as we noted, what none of them knew was that Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, was inadvertently included and was reading the messages as well. Now, he didn't report the contents in real time, but did so days later when that U.S. bombing campaign was well underway in Yemen. All of these senior government officials at work and at home have rooms where they can communicate securely on government systems known as SCIFs, a sensitive compartmented information facility.

7:57And this is what all of them should have been using. Instead, they were on Signal, a publicly available app anyone can download. It encrypts messages and is considered quite good, but it can be hacked. And would you remind us of what Hagseth said in these messages? Yeah, Hegseth gave the exact times the U.S. military was launching F-18 warplanes, drones, and Tomahawk missiles at Yemen. And then he provided updates on when these weapons would begin to strike inside Yemen. And this was the start of a bombing operation against the Houthis that lasted for weeks. And it ended when Houthi attacks diminished against commercial ships in the Red Sea.

8:37Did the Pentagon's Inspector General speak to Hegseth? So the report says Hegseth gave a written response but would not sit for an interview. Hegseth provided a few of his signal messages, but the report relied on screenshots that Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic. Hegseth also denied that he shared classified information, saying he has the authority to declassify information, which is true. He can do that. But the report did not say whether he took any action to do so before sharing the material. And before we let you go, what is the White House saying about this? They're saying that, quote, no classified information was leaked and operational security was not compromised.

9:18President Trump stands by Secretary Hegseth. That is NPR's Greg Meyer. Greg, thank you. Sure thing, Michelle. And I want to mention NPR CEO Catherine Maher also chairs the board of the Signal Foundation. Its subsidiary makes the Signal app.

9:39Some other news now. Vaccine advisors to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention meet today and tomorrow. They're expected to question how pediatricians vaccinate children for more than a dozen diseases. NPR Health correspondent Ping Huan is with us now to tell us more about it. Good morning. Good morning, Michelle. What's this meeting about? So this is the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This is a panel that's been making recommendations on how vaccines should be used since 1964. And back in June, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all the previous members and he replaced them with members who have shown that they are not, generally speaking, all that familiar with the details of vaccine policy or how this group shapes it.

10:19At their last meeting in October, the committee's chairman said that they were rookies when they had to redo a vote. That chairman was replaced just this week, and the new chair is Dr. Kirk Milhone. He's a pediatric cardiologist and a fellow with the Independent Medical Alliance, which is a group that still recommends people use drugs like ivermectin to treat COVID, even though studies have shown it does not work. So what will be covered in this meeting? So a few things. First of all, the group is going to be voting on whether to drop the recommendation that hepatitis B vaccines be given to babies at birth.

10:50This is a policy that's been in effect for more than 30 years. And it's something that came up at the last meeting, where some members wanted to push the vaccine back to when kids are older, and others said it would be a mistake. Now, since that meeting, independent researchers have found that delaying the hep B vaccine by even a couple of months could lead to hundreds of preventable deaths each year. That's from liver cancers and health problems that are prevented by getting this$15 vaccine. Also, they're going to be discussing the overall vaccine schedule, which is who gets which vaccines and when, and also what goes into vaccines.

11:22What are their concerns about the vaccine schedule? So Milhoun, the new committee chair, told The Washington Post that they're going to be looking into whether vaccines are causing asthma, eczema, and other autoimmune diseases in children. This is even though large long-term studies have found no evidence for this. Dr. Sean O 'Leary with the American Academy of Pediatrics says that every vaccine on the schedule is vetted. And it's based on the age at which a child's immune system can provide optimal protection after vaccination, balanced with the age the child is at highest risk for a disease.

11:54Now, Kennedy has also enraged the public health community recently by ordering changes to the CDC's website, suggesting that vaccines and specifically an ingredient containing aluminum might cause autism. This is also not supported by scientific consensus, but it's also a topic for this meeting. And just for folks who might be interested, why is aluminum in vaccines? Yeah, so it's not the aluminum metal by itself. These are chemicals that contain aluminum and they're used to boost the immune system to make the vaccine more effective. Now, they've been used in vaccines since the 1930s, and they're currently used in more than a dozen of them in very small amounts.

12:29But if these ingredients get banned, as some advocates have pushed for, there are no substitute vaccines without them that are ready to go. It could take years for replacements to be developed and to be made. So there is a lot at stake in this meeting. There is, yeah. And a lot of people in medicine, public health are going to be watching very closely. And while doctors groups and some state health departments are making their own independent vaccine recommendations now, this panel still influences what insurance covers and what these public meetings, they have a big megaphone to shape what people hear and think about vaccines.

13:02That's NPR Health correspondent Ping Huang Ping. Thank you. You're welcome.

13:10And that's Up First for Thursday, December 4th. I'm Michelle Martin. And I'm Steve Inskeep. The news you hear on Up First is possible because of you. When you give to your local NPR station, you help to keep journalists on the ground, in your community, and also around the world. You can make a donation at donate.npr.org slash upfirst. For more news and conversations, listen to the radio for Morning Edition, which you can find on your NPR station or at npr.org. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Rebecca Metzler, Andrew Sussman, Scott Hensley, Mohammed Elbardisi, and Alice Wolfley. It was produced by Zia Gbach, Nia Dumas, and Christopher Thomas.

13:46We get engineering support from David Greenberg, and our technical director is Stacey Abbott. Our deputy executive producer is Kelly Dickens. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow.

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