Peter Arnett was already an accomplished combat correspondent in 1966 when he embedded with an American infantry battalion tasked with routing out enemy snipers from a tunnel system near Saigon. Mr. Arnett was standing next to the unit commander when bullets tore through the map the officer was holding, hitting the colonel in the chest.
Medics ran up to bandage Lt. Col. George Eyster, a West Pointer who died the next day at a field hospital. Mr. Arnett wrote his obituary, which was among the scores of stories he filed from the humid jungle battlefields of Vietnam for more than a decade. He won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting that year.
Mr. Arnett stayed in Vietnam beyond the very end. When Viet Cong guerrillas entered the Associated Press bureau during the 1975 fall of Saigon, his boss Nate Polowetzky told him to get out of there. Mr. Arnett refused. “He told me, in effect, to go screw myself,” Polowetzky said.
The New Zealand native would go on to cover more wars (15 to 20, he said), including the Gulf War. He was one of the few Western reporters in Baghdad in January 1991 when allied missiles started raining down, reporting live from the city for CNN. He interviewed Saddam Hussein in the second week of the war, and in 1997, Osama bin Laden.
When Mr. Arnett asked bin Laden about his plans, the 9/11 mastermind replied: “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media. God willing.”
Mr. Arnett died Wednesday at 91, in Newport Beach, Calif. The cause was prostate cancer, said his daughter, Elsa Arnett.
After arriving in Vietnam, Mr. Arnett was given lifesaving advice from one of his AP colleagues, Malcolm Browne: Lie prone under fire; look for cover and move toward it; do not get close to a radioman or medic because they are prime targets; and if you hear a shot, don’t get up to see where it came from because the second shot might get you.
Mr. Arnett, one of the most famous journalists of his era, wrote gripping battlefield stories that transported readers sitting in their living rooms to the scene of the news.
The stories that won him the Pulitzer included a dispatch about an Army captain who watched helplessly as a Viet Cong machine gunner kept pummeling the body of one of his men, rolling it over and over. In a story titled “Everyone Knew the Americans Were Coming,” Arnett wrote on a failed U.S. mission aimed at hunting down Viet Cong fighters who easily got away.
Peter Arnett walks in front of a U.S. tank in Vietnam in 1967.
Reporting on the Vietnam War forced Mr. Arnett to repress his human instincts. On one hot day at the Saigon market, Mr. Arnett watched a Buddhist monk squat on the pavement and douse himself in gasoline before flicking a lighter.
“I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away,’” Mr. Arnett recalled. “As a human being I wanted to. As a reporter I couldn’t. … If I had stopped him, the [South Vietnamese] secret police who were watching from a distance would have immediately arrested him and carried him off to God knows where. If I had attempted to prevent them doing this, I would have propelled myself directly into Vietnamese politics. My role as a reporter would have been destroyed.”
Instead, Mr. Arnett photographed the burning monk and dashed back to his office to write his story.
But Mr. Arnett’s eagerness to report entangled him in controversy. In the Gulf War, as one of the few Western journalists reporting from behind enemy lines in Iraq, he was granted access by Hussein’s regime to what officials said was an industrial plant that produced milk powder and was the only source of infant formula in Baghdad. It had been hit by U.S. bombs.
Mr. Arnett reported on CNN what he saw and heard, and went to bed. The next day, he learned that he had reported on “one of the most controversial stories of my career.” U.S. officials disputed the claim that the factory made baby milk powder and instead alleged it was used for the production of biological weapons protected by the Iraqi military. White House officials called him a “conduit for Iraqi disinformation,” while Rep. Laurence Coughlin (R., Pa.) called him the “Joseph Goebbels of Saddam Hussein’s Hitler-like regime.”
Sen. Al Simpson (R., Wyo.) went so far as to accuse the brother of Mr. Arnett’s Vietnamese-born wife of being a Viet Cong operative. (Simpson later apologized, saying there was no evidence to prove that claim.)
Mr. Arnett kept reporting, showing the damaged buildings in the town of Al-Dour that Iraqi officials said had been hit by U.S. and allied bombs and had resulted in 24 civilian deaths.
“There was nothing in his tone that was judgmental, nothing that indicated sympathy for the Iraqis,” wrote Howard Rosenberg, the Los Angeles Times’s TV critic. “Without interpretation, he reported only what he said he saw, accompanied by the appropriate disclaimers regarding censorship.”
In 1999, Mr. Arnett left CNN after being involved in a story that alleged that the U.S. military had used deadly sarin nerve gas on deserting American soldiers during the Vietnam War. When a subsequent Pentagon investigation said there was no evidence of sarin gas ever having been shipped to Southeast Asia and disputed other key portions of the story, CNN retracted it.
Mr. Arnett faced further criticism in 2003, when he gave an interview to Iraqi state television.
“It is clear that within the United States there is growing challenge to President Bush about the conduct of the war and also opposition to the war. So our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces … help those who oppose the war,” he said.
The remarks sparked backlash from the administration of President George W. Bush and lawmakers from both parties. His employer, NBC, initially defended him, saying the remarks were “analytical in nature,” but eventually fired him, saying it had been wrong for Mr. Arnett to “grant an interview to state-controlled Iraqi TV — especially at a time of war — and it was wrong for him to discuss his personal observations and opinions in that interview.”
Peter Gregg Arnett was born in Riverton, New Zealand, on Nov. 13, 1934.
He began his journalism career in his country of birth, writing for the Southland Times newspaper. Restless and bored, he left his home country seeking adventure. When he arrived in Southeast Asia, he decided to stay, enchanted by the “opium smugglers, revolutionaries and obscure little wars in obscure little kingdoms.”
He ended up reporting from Thailand and Indonesia before he arrived in Vietnam.
In Vietnam, he worked and competed with the other big-name journalists including David Halberstam and Marguerite Higgins.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in the mid-1980s while CNN’s Moscow bureau chief. Mr. Arnett thought it was important that he should be an American citizen because he was representing an American news organization, according to his family. Mr. Arnett said in a 2015 interview that his U.S. citizenship “solidified my credentials to challenge American policy.”
“I was perfectly happy to be a New Zealander, and it wasn’t an issue in my work. The Associated Press and CNN were more interested in the journalism than the nationality,” Mr. Arnett said. He added, however, that there were “a lot of comments during the Gulf War” about his foreign origins.
“But the point was, I was an American. If I hadn’t been, it would have been a way to further discredit my journalism.”
He met Nina Nguyen Thu-Nga, a South Vietnamese woman, while covering the war. He married her and they had two children, Andrew and Elsa, before divorcing in 1983. His frequent and extended travels abroad were to blame, according to Mr. Arnett’s family. They remarried in 2006 and stayed together until his death.
President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, and other senior officials were looking for a fight.
In the first months of the administration, Miller, the architect of Trump’s anti-immigration and border policies, and his team discussed starting a new war on drugs by striking cartels and alleged traffickers in Mexico, according to one current and two former U.S. officials.
Reducing the power of cartels, an idea that dated back to the first Trump administration, would ease the flow of migrants and narcotics, creating early political wins. But as the administration surged thousands of U.S. troops to the southern border, increased U.S. surveillance flights and boosted intelligence sharing with its neighbor, Mexican military operations across the border curbed cartel action, the people said. That left Miller and his team looking for another target.
“When you hope and wait for something to develop that doesn’t, you start looking at countries south of Mexico,” said the current official, who, like nine others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
The campaign that emerged in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean is unprecedented in its use of lethal force by the U.S. military against alleged drug smuggling groups. These operations, which began Sept. 2, have evolved to embrace the Trump team’s long-running ambition to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whom the president has accused of overseeing “narco-terrorists” assaulting the United States.
A U.S. soldier is deployed along the U.S.-Mexico border as part of the Joint Task Force Southern Border mission, in Sunland Park, N.M., on April 4.
Miller has been a driving force behind the administration’s counternarcotics campaign, pressing for results and fresh military options that could be turned into future operations, the current and former officials said.
“President Trump’s counternarcotics policies come from President Trump himself,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All senior administration officials work closely together to carry out the agenda President Trump was elected to implement, including eliminating the scourge of narco-terrorism that takes tens of thousands of American lives every year.”
Miller could not be reached for comment.
Miller steered the drafting of a July 25 classified directive signed by the president that authorized the military to undertake lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups, said a former U.S. official familiar with the campaign and its evolution. The administration has labeled these groups “designated terrorist organizations,” accusing them of using drugs as a weapon to kill Americans, using a moniker that many experts say has no basis in law.
“The president’s memo is the original sin of the whole operation,” the former official said.
That presidential directive provided the foundational authority for an “execute order” that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued on Aug. 5 and that subsequently has been modified. The order, details of which were previously unreported, contains permissive targeting guidelines for lethal operations, current and former officials said. The presidential directive’s existence was first reported by the New York Times.
Together, these two documents guided a military campaign of lethal strikes against criminal organizations, grafting a wartime frame to what has been traditionally treated as a law enforcement problem. The execute order also contains targeting criteria lifted from the language of the counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which some current and former officials say give the Pentagon an overly permissive license to kill.
The department will treat suspected drug smugglers “EXACTLY how we treated Al-Qaeda. We will continue to track them, map them, hunt them, and kill them,” Hegseth said on social media last month.
Pursuant to these orders, the Trump administration has launched strikes on at least 26 boats, killing at least 99 people in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The Pentagon has not publicly identified those killed, and it is unclear whether it has collected the intelligence to do so.
“The administration appears to have authorized a campaign against civilians and alleged criminals that is now stretching the limits of international law so that it’s now totally unrecognizable,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign and is director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
The White House’s early deliberations about the use of lethal force against cartels contemplated using covert action by theCIA. But as resistance emerged from lawyers and others over the ensuing months, Miller and his team turned increasingly toward the idea of using the military to pursue alleged traffickers.
Miller’s larger vision was to reduce the flow of drugs — and migrants — into the United States. He figured that attacking cartels would diminish their power and help stabilize Latin American countries, resulting in fewer people risking the trek to the United States, according to one of the former U.S. officials familiar with Miller’s deliberations.
As the summer progressed, the White House’s campaigns against narcotics and migration coalesced with a long-held desire of Secretary of State Marco Rubio to force Maduro from power. Rubio and the Justice Department in August doubled to $50 million the reward for information leading to the Venezuelan leader’s arrest, citing an indictment for corruption and drug trafficking during the first Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the White House found a willing partner in Hegseth, who had been knockedoff stride by several missteps and was eager to show he could deliver on a high-priority mission.
“Pete very much wanted to keep Stephen in his good graces and also the president,” said the former official familiar with Miller’s thinking. “And that was a motivation for him — getting behind this campaign in an aggressive way.”
The Defense Department declined to address questions about its operations to strike alleged traffickers and how the mission took shape. Elements of Miller’s leading role were reported earlier by the Guardian.
“This reporting is inaccurate and is built on a false premise that ignores reality,” Pentagon chief spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement. The department’s focus, he said, “is, and will continue to be, protecting the Homeland from any threat.”
Widening the scope
The Aug. 5 execute order,or EXORD in Pentagon parlance, stated that the campaign’s goal is to stop the flow of drugs by sea to the United States, two people said.
Initially, the order contained a geographic boundary that designated target areas in international waters off the coast of Venezuela, but it was modified about two months later to include the eastern Pacific area, one current and one former U.S. official said.It specified that at least for the initial strikes, Joint Special Operations Command would be in charge of operations, the two people said.
A still frame from a video posted on social media by President Donald Trump shows a boat allegedly transporting illegal narcotics after a lethal strike on Sept. 2, through U.S. military imagery.
Over the late summer and into the fall, lawyers and policy personnel raised concerns about the legality of the lethal force campaign that was taking shape. Administration officials sought to reassure them by saying that a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo was being drafted that determined that the lethal targeting of suspected drug runners was lawful under the president’s power to ascertain that the U.S. is in a formal state of war — in this case with alleged drug traffickers.
But the opinion was not signed until Sept. 5 — three days after the first boat strike — and some career lawyers were not permitted to read the draft OLC memo before the execute order was issued, said the former official familiar with the campaign’s evolution.
The OLC memo, signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser, asserts that alleged drug trafficking groups are a threat to the United States akin to a foreign nation attempting to invade, Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who was allowed to read it in his capacity as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Post in an interview.
The execute order contains targeting instructions that do not require positive identification of any individual but rather “reasonable certainty” that adult males are members of, or affiliated with, a “designated terrorist organization,” or DTO, according to five current and former U.S. officials familiar with the criteria. To mitigate civilian harm, the order requires “near certainty” that no women, children or civilians are present, they said.
The administration is using the phrase “designated terrorist organizations” to refer to 24 alleged drug trafficking groups whose activities it contends are killing millions of Americans.
The term, said Rebecca Ingber, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law and a former State Department law-of-war expert, “is entirely manufactured as a source of targeting authority with no basis in law.”
The list of 24 such groups appears in an annex to Trump’s July directive and also in the EXORD, according to one current and one former official.
The assessment of “affiliation” is based on a number of factors, including the presence of drugs on board the vessel and its route, as well as intercepts of communications, the current and former officials said.
As a result, the campaign may be killing individuals who in some cases have a tenuous link to any organized drug-running operation, said one of the former U.S. officials, who has read the execute order.
“When you define DTO and affiliate so loosely and you’re attacking boats, [the guidelines are] basically meaningless,” the former official said.
If the United States were actually at war, the reasonable certainty standard would be “perfectly reasonable,” said Ryan Goodman, a former Pentagon special counsel who worked on counterterrorism targeting issues in the Obama administration.
“Not being in an armed conflict changes everything,” he said. “The idea that a government would kill people on the basis of ‘reasonable certainty’ that they’re a member of a drug cartel is beyond the pale. Any U.N. body would find that to be a gross violation of human rights.”
Identification and delegation
The targeting requirements, four former officials say, resemble the “signature strikes” of past global counterterrorism campaigns, in which the CIA and the military launched drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen on individuals or groups whose identities were unknown but who were targeted based on a pattern of behavior or other characteristics associated with terrorist activity.
The execute order, which sets the rules of engagement for the military, designates Hegseth as the “target engagement authority” — the official who can approve strike targets. It also stipulates that he can delegate that authority to others in individual missions.
“Now, the first couple of strikes … as any leader would want, you want to own that responsibility,” Hegseth said at a cabinet meeting this monthin response to questions about the first boat strike, details of which — including a subsequent missile strike to kill survivors — were first published bythe Post. “So I said I’m going to be the one to make the call after getting all the information and make sure it’s the right strike.”
Pentagon general counsel Earl Matthews — who had just been confirmed by the Senate on July 29 with a 50-47 vote — signed off on the Aug. 5 order, said a person familiar with the matter. Lawmakers have for weeks requested a copy of the order and related documents but have not received them. Matthews did not respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump signed a classified directive that authorized the military to undertake lethal force against two dozen foreign criminal groups.
Trump has asserted, without offering proof, that the U.S. troops know who they are targeting in every case. “We know everything about them. We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live,” he told reporters this month.
The military knew the identities of all 11 people killed in the first attack of the campaign on Sept. 2, Pentagon officials have said. But “they don’t know all of the individuals on many of the other boats” in subsequent strikes, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D., Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told ABC News on Sunday.
Trump posted on Truth Social the day of the first strike that the U.S. military had killed 11 “positively identified” members of the Venezuelan organization Tren de Aragua. He called them “narco-terrorists” operating “under the control of” Maduro, who has been condemned by both the Trump and Biden administrations for illegally retaining power after losing last year’s presidential election.
This week, the commander overseeing that operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, told lawmakers that the military knew one of the 11 was a member of Tren de Aragua and the other 10 were affiliates, according to three U.S. officials.
The U.S. intelligence community this year assessed that Tren de Aragua, a transnational crime syndicate, was not directed by Venezuela’s government.
Two family members of men killed on Sept. 2 did not deny that the boat was smuggling marijuana and cocaine. But they said Trump’s allegation the men had worked for Tren de Aragua was inaccurate.
“I knew them all,” one of the family members told the Post in October, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “None of them had anything to do with Tren de Aragua. They were fishermen who were looking for a better life” by smuggling contraband.
In some of the strikes, the targets who have been identified are not high-level operators or cartel bosses, lawmakers said. “It’s one thing to be a narco-terrorist and another thing to be a fisherman that’s getting paid a hundred bucks a couple times a year … to supplement his income” to ferry drugs, Warner told reporters at the Defense Writers Group last week.
Lifting language from the ‘war on terror’
The Aug. 5 execute order adopts the language of previous administrations in successive global counterterrorism campaigns after 2001, but the context is vastly different, current and former officials say.
The fight against ISIS in Iraq from 2014 on generally involved clearing terrain of fighters who often barricaded themselves in buildings in cities teeming with civilians, and U.S. troops were often firing in self-defense at militants shooting at them, former Special Operations personnel said.
In the drug boat campaign, the U.S. military is launching munitions from afar, more like the counterterrorism operations in Yemen and Somalia during the Obama and first Trump administrations.
Under President Barack Obama, outside areas of active hostility, the targeting guidelines required that lethal force be used only when capture was not feasible and only to prevent attacks against U.S. citizens or when targets posed a continuing imminent threat. They required “near certainty” that a target was a member of a terrorist organization.
“Generally you had people swearing allegiance” to a group like al-Qaeda as an indicator of membership, said the former U.S. official, who is familiar with the counterterrorism targeting criteria. “So you had the presence of weapons and good intelligence on planning you could point to, to link people to the group and say this person is a planner of attacks, this is the money guy, this is a recruiter, etc.”
The standard was changed to “reasonable certainty” under the first Trump administration. But for all practical purposes, said a former senior military officer involved in special operations and battle in the Middle East, the military was applying the “near certainty” standard in these areas. The standard was returned to near certainty under Biden.
“In places like Yemen, whether it was under Obama or Trump,” the retired officer said,“we knew who we were going after. We knew what their place in the network was. We knew what the effects of removing them would be on the network. I don’t see that in some of what [the U.S. is] doing right now.”
One major contextual difference in the current operations against seaborne narcotics is the lack of congressional authority. In the battles against al-Qaeda and associated forces, Congress explicitly authorized the campaigns, giving the president permission to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
The execute order and subsequent targeting guidelines were grounded in the 2001 congressional authorization to use military force.
In 2013, during the Obama administration, the “near certainty” standard typically required confirmation via two sources of intelligence, said Huntley, the former military lawyer for Special Operations forces.
A combination of intelligence tools — signals intelligence, eavesdropping, human spies, and drone surveillance — would contribute to a “positive identification of the individual,” Huntley said. To get to “near certainty” that civilians were not present, the attack location was usually a remote area or a place known to be frequented by only members of the terrorist organization that Congress had specifically authorized as a viable target.
If U.S. officials know the identities of who they are striking, as Trump and Hegseth maintain, then they should release them, the former senior military officer said. “It would help build the case,” he said, that the military is acting to protect civilians according to the law of war.
‘Anybody … is subject to attack’
Though the administration’s charges against Maduro have merit, its claims that Venezuela is sending massive amounts of drugs to America do not, analysts and officials have said.The main domestic drug scourge is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid produced in Mexico, not Venezuela.
Many strikes taken have been in the Pacific, the main sea lane used by traffickers from Colombia and Ecuador. Drug running in the Caribbean focuses mainly on non-U.S. markets, such as Europe. The lethal strike on Sept. 2, for instance, targeted a boat carrying cocaine ultimately bound for Suriname, officials have said.
That absence of information has prompted speculation that the larger buildup of U.S. forces in the region is a preparation for an attack on Venezuela. Miller has indicated to colleagues that a strong reaction from Caracas could provide the reasoning to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States, the former official noted.
This month, Trump suggested that he wanted to go after Colombian targets. “I hear the country of Colombia is making cocaine,” he said. “They have cocaine manufacturing plants. And then they sell us their cocaine. … Anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack.”
He also has stepped up the pressure on Venezuela, seizing an oil tanker last week off that country’s coast.
“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Trump’s chief of staff, Susan Wiles, told Vanity Fair in an article published this week. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
On Tuesday, Trump announced in a social media post a “total and complete blockade” of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, further ratcheting up the pressure.
On Wednesday, Miller amplified Trump’s post, commenting: “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela. Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property. These pillaged assets were then used to fund terrorism and flood our streets with killers, mercenaries and drugs.”
Trump, meanwhile, has been signaling that the campaign is widening.
“We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters Friday in the Oval Office. “And now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening.”
WASHINGTON — U.S. inflation slowed unexpectedly last month, the government said in a report that was delayed and likely distorted by the government shutdown.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that its consumer price index rose 2.7% in November from a year earlier. Yet, year-over-year inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, and Americans are complaining loudly about the high cost of living.
The report was delayed eight days by the federal government’s 43-day shutdown, which also prevented the Labor Department from compiling overall numbers for consumer prices and core inflation in October. Thursday’ report gave investors, businesses and policymakers their first look at CPI since the September numbers were released on Oct. 24.
Consumers prices had risen 3% in September from a year earlier, and forecasters had expected the November CPI to match that year-over-year increase.
Energy prices, driven up by sharply higher fuel oil prices, rose 4.2% in November. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core inflation rose 2.6%, compared with a 3% year-over-year gain in September and the lowest since March 2021.
U.S. inflation is still stubbornly high, partly because of President Donald Trump’s decision to impose double-digit taxes on imports from almost every country on earth along with targeted tariffs on specific products like steel, aluminum and autos.
The president’s tariffs have so far proved less inflationary than economists feared. But they do put upward pressure on prices and complicate matters at the Fed, which is trying to decide whether to keep cutting its benchmark interest rate to support a sputtering job market or whether to hold off until inflationary pressures ease. The central bank last week decided to reduce the rate for the third time this year, but Fed officials signaled that they expect just one cut in 2026.
Kay Haigh, global co-head of fixed income and liquidity solutions at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, warned that the November numbers were “noisy … The canceling of the October report makes month-on-month comparisons impossible, for example, while the truncated information-gathering process given the shutdown could have caused systematic biases in the data.
“The Fed will instead focus on the December CPI released in mid-January, just two weeks before its next meeting, as a more accurate bellwether for inflation.’’
The speech was a rehash of his recent messaging that has so far been unable to calm public anxiety about the cost of groceries, housing, utilities and other basic goods. Trump has promised an economic boom, yet inflation has stayed elevated and the job market has weakened sharply in the wake of his import taxes.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump delivered a politically charged speech Wednesday carried live in prime time on network television, seeking to pin the blame for economic challenges on Democrats while announcing he is sending a $1,776 bonus check to U.S. troops for Christmas.
The remarks came as the nation is preparing to settle down to celebrate the holidays, yet Trump was focused more on divisions within the country than a sense of unity. His speech was a rehash of his recent messaging that has so far been unable to calm public anxiety about the cost of groceries, housing, utilities and other basic goods.
Trump has promised an economic boom, yet inflation has stayed elevated and the job market has weakened sharply in the wake of his import taxes. Trump suggested that his tariffs — which are partly responsible for boosting consumer prices — would fund a new “warrior dividend” for 1.45 million military members, a payment that could ease some of the financial strains for many households. The amount of $1,776 was a reference to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“The checks are already on the way,” he said of the expenditure, which would total roughly $2.6 billion.
Presidential addresses to the nation carried on network television are traditionally less partisan than rally speeches, but Trump gave a condensed version of his usual political remarks.
Flanked by two Christmas trees with a portrait of George Washington behind him in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room, Trump sought to pin any worries about the economy on his predecessor, Joe Biden.
“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump said. “We’re poised for an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen.”
Trump seeking to stop the slump in his approval ratings
His holiday wishes came at a crucial time as he tries to rebuild his steadily eroding popularity. Public polling shows most U.S. adults are frustrated with his handling of the economy as inflation picked up after his tariffs raised prices and hiring slowed.
In 2026, Trump and his party face a referendum on their leadership as the nation heads into the midterm elections that will decide control of the House and the Senate.
The White House remarks were a chance for Trump to try to regain some momentum after Republican losses in this year’s elections raised questions about the durability of his coalition. He openly leaned into the politics despite television networks’ past reluctance to broadcast presidential addresses loaded with campaign-style rhetoric.
For example, in September 2022, networks declined to give the Biden White House a prime-time slot for a speech the then-president gave about democracy because it was viewed as too political.
Trump spoke at a rapid-fire clip with a tone that bordered at times on anger. He responded to the public frustration this year over the economy by making even bolder promises on growth next year, saying that mortgage rates would be coming down and that he “would announce some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history.”
Trump brought charts with him to make the case that the economy is on an upward trajectory. He made claims about incomes growing, inflation easing and investment dollars pouring into the country as foreign leaders, he claimed, have assured him that “we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” a statement he has frequently repeated at public events.
If the argument seemed familiar, that’s because it has echoes of the case that Biden made about the U.S. economy with little success. He, too, in the face of inflation pointed to the enviable rate of U.S. economic growth compared to other nations.
The public sees the economy differently from Trump
The hard math internalized by the public paints a more complicated picture of an economy that has some stability but few reasons to inspire much public confidence.
The stock market is up, gasoline prices are down and tech companies are placing large bets on the development of artificial intelligence.
But inflation that had been descending after spiking to a four-decade high in 2022 under Biden has reaccelerated after Trump announced his tariffs in April.
The consumer price index is increasing at an annual rate of 3%, up from 2.3% in April.
The affordability squeeze is also coming from a softening job market. Monthly job gains have averaged a paltry 17,000 since April’s “Liberation Day,” when Trump announced import taxes that he later suspended and then readjusted several months later.
The unemployment rate has climbed from 4% in January to 4.6%.
Trump said that investment commitments for new factories will boost manufacturing jobs and that consumer activity will improve dramatically as people receive increased tax refunds next year.
While emphasizing the economy, he also faces challenges on other policy fronts.
Trump sought to blame Democrats for the likely increase in health insurance premiums as the subsidies tied to the 2010 Affordable Care Act are expiring. Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans have sought to address that issue, but Trump has pushed back and suggested instead that payments should go directly to the buyers of health insurance instead of the companies. The president has yet to commit to a specific legislative fix.
After his speech ended and the video was no longer being broadcast, Trump turned to his gathered aides and asked them how his address to the nation went. The aides assured him it was great.
Trump then indicated that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles had told him he needed to address the nation. After some back and forth, he asked Wiles how he had done.
“I told you 20 minutes and you were 20 minutes on the dot,” Wiles said.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino announced Wednesday that in January he will leave the powerful job in which he helped oversee a tumultuous period at the bureau with major shifts of resources and dramatic dismissals of experienced agents.
President Donald Trump commended Bongino on his tenure and suggested that he would be returning to his job as a conservative podcaster.
“Dan did a great job. I think he wants to go back to his show,” Trump told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
Bongino — the second most powerful person in the FBI — had left Washington for the year more than a week ago and said he would not be returning to the agency’s headquarters, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a personnel issue they were not authorized to talk about publicly. He had previously told colleagues that his last official day at the bureau will be in January, according to two people familiar with the matter.
“I want to thank President Trump, [Attorney General Pam Bondi] and [FBI Director Kash Patel] for the opportunity to serve with purpose,” Bongino wrote in a social media post announcing his departure. “Most importantly, I want to thank you, my fellow Americans, for the privilege to serve you. God bless America, and all those who defend Her.”
The departure after less than a year would mark the end of a tumultuous tenure for Bongino, who left a lucrative job as a podcaster to serve as second-in-command at the FBI when Trump became president. Bongino serves under FBI Director Kash Patel.
Patel and Bongino have shifted FBI resources to immigration enforcement, sinking morale at an agency that typically attracts law enforcement officials who are trained to work on more complex investigations. They have also pushed out seasoned veterans within the bureau with years of experience in national security and public corruption probes.
Multiple people familiar with his thinking said he has been unhappy at the FBI and has threatened to leave multiple times.
Three months into his job, Bongino expressed frustration with the demands of the deputy director position during a Fox News appearance.
“I gave up everything for this. My wife is struggling,” he said in the May interview. He continued, “I stare at these four walls all day in D.C., by myself, divorced from my wife — not divorced — but, I mean, separated, and it’s hard.”
When Trump named Bongino deputy director, the president transformed what was long a powerful career position that oversaw the day-to-day operations of the bureau into a political job with a more public presence.
Bongino, a Trump loyalist who had previously worked at the Secret Service, built his reputation within right-wing circles during the Biden administration. He did so in part by spreading conspiracy theories about the FBI and its workforce and criticizing law enforcement as politicized.
After Bongino began his job at the FBI and couldn’t prove the baseless theories he spread on his podcast, many of his right-wing supporters turned on him.
Bongino and Patel — also a conservative media personality — used their platforms, for example, to spread inaccuracies about the high-profile sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the Biden administration without evidence of covering up key details of the case.
When the Justice Department declared during the summer that there was no rumored “client list” tied to Epstein and that the law enforcement agency would not be releasing any more investigatory files, many people directed their ire at Bongino and Patel and accused the Trump administration of lying to the American people.
In August, the Trump administration named then-Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey as the FBI’s co-deputy director, installing the Republican firebrand to serve alongside Bongino. Bailey was considered for a top Justice Department position at the beginning of the administration, but the president opted not to nominate him.
Since joining the bureau, Bailey has assumed a more behind-the scenes role than Bongino. Bailey is expected to remain in his slot as deputy director.
Patel and Bongino have pushed out senior FBI officials across the country, often with no stated reason or in response to far-right critics online who have called for the agents’ removals because of cases they may have been involved in. That has prompted multiple lawsuits against the FBI.
The lawsuits have portrayed Bongino and Patel as more concerned with their reputations online than with learning how the FBI operates.
DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — President Donald Trump paid his respects Wednesday to two Iowa National Guard members and a U.S. civilian interpreter who were killed in an attack in the Syrian desert, joining their grieving families as their remains were brought back to the country they served.
Trump met privately with the families at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware before he joined top military officials and other dignitaries on the tarmac for the dignified transfer, a solemn and largely silent ritual honoring U.S. service members killed in action.
The guardsmen killed in Syria on Saturday were Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar, 25, of Des Moines, and Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard, 29, of Marshalltown, according to the U.S. Army. Both were members of the 1st Squadron, 113th Cavalry Regiment, and have been hailed as heroes by the Iowa National Guard. Their remains will be taken to Iowa.
Torres-Tovar’s and Howard’s families were at Dover for the return of their remains, alongside Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, members of Iowa’s congressional delegation and leaders of the Iowa National Guard.
Ayad Mansoor Sakat, of Macomb, Mich., a U.S. civilian working as an interpreter, was also killed. Three other Iowa National Guard members were injured in the attack. The Pentagon has not identified them.
They were among hundreds of U.S. troops deployed in eastern Syria as part of a coalition fighting the Islamic State group.
Returning to Joint Base Andrews after the transfer, Trump said it was a “beautiful event for three great people. And they’re now looking down and their parents and wives and all of the people that were there were, I mean, were devastated but great people, great people.”
The return of service member remains
Trump observed several dignified transfers at Dover in his first term and has said it was “the toughest thing I have to do” as president.
There is no formal role for a president at a dignified transfer other than to watch in silence, keeping all thoughts to himself for the moment. There is no speaking by any of the politicians and other dignitaries who attend, with the only words coming from the military officials who direct the highly choreographed transfers.
Trump, wearing an overcoat against the chill and brisk wind, joined the other attendees in a salute that was held as each of the American flag-draped transfer cases was carried from the belly of a hulking C-17 military cargo plane and loaded into a dark, unmarked van nearby.
He gazed straight ahead as each case passed in front of him, though he turned to look after the first one was placed inside the vehicle. The remains were taken to the on-base mortuary for processing before they are released to the families.
At the start of the transfer, Trump and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined several others from the military at the open rear of the cargo plane, where all but Trump bowed their heads. The president looked inside the plane. Trump then stood alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when the group joined the official party.
Before Trump joined the others, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who flew up with Trump, dabbed her eyes with a tissue.
Iowa National Guard members hailed as heroes
Howard’s stepfather, Jeffrey Bunn, has said Howard “loved what he was doing and would be the first in and last out.” He said Howard had wanted to be a soldier since he was a boy. Howard’s brother, a staff sergeant in the Iowa National Guard, was escorting him back to Iowa.
Torres-Tovar was remembered as a “very positive” family-oriented person who always put others first, according to fellow Guard members who were deployed with him and issued a statement to the local TV broadcast station WOI.
Dina Qiryaqoz, the daughter of the civilian interpreter, said Wednesday in a statement that her father worked for the U.S. Army during the invasion of Iraq from 2003 to 2007. Sakat is survived by his wife and four adult children.
The interpreter was from Bakhdida, Iraq, a small Catholic village southeast of Mosul, and the family immigrated to the U.S. in 2007 on a special visa, Qiryaqoz said. At the time of his death, Sakat was employed as an independent contractor for Virginia-based Valiant Integrated Services.
Sakat’s family was still struggling to believe that he is gone. “He was a devoted father and husband, a courageous interpreter and a man who believed deeply in the mission he served,” Qiryaqoz said.
Trump’s reaction to the attack in Syria
Trump has vowed retaliation, and the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, has said the attack is under active investigation. The U.S. military said the gunman was killed in the attack.
Before this attack, the most recent instance of U.S. service members being killed in action was in January 2024, when three American troops died in a drone attack in Jordan.
Saturday’s deadly attack followed a rapprochement between the U.S. and Syria, bringing the former pariah state into a U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group.
The Trump administration said Tuesday it was breaking up one of the world’s preeminent earth and atmospheric research institutions, based in Colorado, over concerns about “climate alarmism” — a move that comes amid escalating attacks from the White House against the state’s Democratic lawmakers.
“The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado,” wrote Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget on X. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
The plan was first reported by USA Today.
The NCAR laboratory in Boulder was founded in 1960 at the base of the Rocky Mountains to conduct research and educate future scientists. Its resources include supercomputers, valuable datasets, and high-tech research planes.
The announcement drew outrage and concern from scientists and local lawmakers, who said it could imperil the country’s weather and climate forecasting, and appeared to take officials and employees by surprise.
NCAR’s dismantling would be a major loss for scientific research, said Kevin Trenberth, a distinguished scholar at NCAR and an honorary academic in physics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Trenberth, who joined NCAR in 1984 and officially retired in 2020, said the research center is key to advanced climate science discoveries as well as in informing the climate models that produce the weather forecasts we see on the nightly news.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement that the state had not received information about the administration’s intentions to dismantle NCAR.
“If true, public safety is at risk and science is being attacked,” said Polis. “Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”
The action comes as Republicans have escalated their attacks on Polis and others in the state for their handling of a case involving Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was convicted in state court on felony charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. President Donald Trump announced last week that he is pardoning Peters, who is serving a nine-year sentence, but it is unclear whether Trump has that authority, because she was not convicted in federal court.
In a joint statement, Colorado’s two Democratic senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, and Rep. Joe Neguse (D., Colo.) slammed the move and vowed to fight back against it.
In his social media post, Vought said that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location” — but did not specify further.
“The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president,” said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The official declined to cite any specifics about how Polis is refusing to cooperate, from the administration’s perspective, but denied that the move was in response to the state’s refusal to release Peters from prison.
The facility “is not in line with the president’s agenda,” the official added, noting that it had “been on the radar” of the administration “for a while.”
The National Science Foundation, the federal science agency that funds the center, was blindsided by the announcement, according to a person familiar with NSF operations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. But they said facilities managers at NSF will need to be involved in moving assets or capabilities. An NSF spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about the plan to dismantle NCAR.
Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which oversees NCAR, said it was aware of reports to break up the center but did not have “additional information about any such plan.”
“Any plans to dismantle NSF NCAR would set back our nation’s ability to predict, prepare for, and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters,” Busalacchi said.
An internal email obtained by the Washington Post, sent Tuesday night, emphasized the critical work NCAR does for “community safety and resilience.”
Busalacchi wrote that the news had come as a shock, and the institution had reached out to NSF for more information. “We understand that this situation is incredibly distressing, and we ask that you all continue doing what you have done so well all year — provide support for one another as we navigate this turbulent time,” Busalacchi wrote.
The center is “quite literally our global mother ship,” Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University professor and chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy, wrote on X. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.”
NCAR plays a unique role in the scientific community by bringing together otherwise siloed specialists to collaborate on some of the biggest climate and weather questions of our time, Caspar Ammann, a former research scientist at the center, said in an email.
“Without NCAR, a lot could not happen,” he said. “A lot of research at US Universities would immediately get hampered, industry would lose access to reliable base data.”
Ammann added that around the world, weather and climate services use NCAR modeling and forecasting tools.
The Colorado-based center draws scientists and lecturers from all over the world, and through its education programs has helped produce future scientists, Trenberth said.
He said he feared not just for the discoveries and data that would be lost if the center were to close, but for the early careers that could also be affected or destroyed.
“If this sort of thing happens, things will go on for a little while,” he said. “But the next generation of people who deal with weather and science in the United States will be lost.”
WASHINGTON — Democratic senators on Wednesday hammered the Federal Communications Commission’s leader for pressuring broadcasters to take ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air, suggesting that Brendan Carr was politicizing an independent agency and trampling the First Amendment.
The FCC chairman refused to disown his comments about Kimmel and, when questioned by Democrats about an agency long considered autonomous, suggested it was not insulated from Trump’s pressure.
“The FCC is not an independent agency,” Carr said.
Carr later sidestepped questions about whether he considered the Republican president to be his boss and whether he had taken orders from Trump or his inner circle.
“President Trump has designated me as chairman of the FCC,” Carr added later. “I think it comes as no surprise that I’m aligned with President Trump on policy.”
Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) noted that the FCC’s website described it as an “independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress.”
Soon after, with the hearing still underway, the website changed, removing “independent” from a section describing its mission.
Trump has waged an aggressive campaign against the media in his second term, filing lawsuits against outlets whose coverage he dislikes, and threatening to revoke TV broadcast licenses. On Wednesday, he criticized NBC for an interview with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, saying the network “should be ashamed of themselves.”
“The Public airwaves, which these Networks are using at no charge, should not be allowed to get away with this any longer!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They should be properly licensed, and pay significant amounts of money for using this very valuable Public space.”
The 2½-hour hearing before the Senate Commerce committee repeatedly circled back to Carr’s stance on Kimmel after the late-night host’s comments on slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. At the time, Carr’s vocal criticism and veiled threats were equated with that of a mob boss.
Carr said he was simply enforcing laws holding networks to stricter scrutiny than cable and other forms of media and that “the FCC has walked away from enforcing the public interest standard.”
Democrats insisted he was warping the laws Carr invoked.
“You are weaponizing the public interest standard,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.), who told Carr that he should resign.
Republican senators referenced perceived First Amendment violations by the administration of former President Joe Biden, calling Democrats’ free speech arguments disingenuous. GOP members appeared intent on bringing up broadcast spectrum auctions, undersea cable infrastructure, algorithm-driven content, robocalls, and just about anything other than Carr’s statements about Kimmel.
The committee chairman, Sen. Ted Cruz, had previously equated Carr’s comments to those of a mobster and called them “dangerous as hell.” But at the hearing, Cruz (R., Texas) took a far softer stance. He dismissed Kimmel as “tasteless” and “unfunny,” and shifted to criticizing Biden’s administration, a tack that Carr parroted throughout the hearing.
“Joe Biden is no longer president,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, (D., Minn.) shot back at one point.
The hearing also included the two other commissioners, Olivia Trusty and Anna M. Gomez. Gomez, a Biden appointee, said that the FCC has “undermined its reputation as a stable, independent, and expert-driven regulatory body.”
“Nowhere is that departure more concerning,” Gomez said, “than its actions to intimidate government critics, pressure media companies and challenge the boundaries of the First Amendment.”
Carr was nominated to the FCC by both Trump and Biden and unanimously confirmed by the Senate three times. But he has more recently shown more overtly right-wing views, writing a section on the FCC for “Project 2025,” the sweeping blueprint for gutting the federal workforce and dismantling agencies in Trump’s second term.
Since becoming chairman this year, Carr has launched separate investigations of all three major broadcast networks. After Kimmel’s comments on the September killing of Kirk, who was a Trump ally and leading voice of the right, Carr said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Cruz was unflinchingly critical at the time, saying “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.”
While Cruz did not repeat those words Wednesday, they were repeatedly invoked by Democrats. Carr did not directly respond to questions from reporters following the hearing about Cruz’s original comments.
“I think the hearing went really well,” Carr said in response.
Four moderate Republicans — including three who are in the hot seat for reelection in swing districts in Pennsylvania — joined Democrats to sign a discharge petition Wednesday to force a vote on a proposal to extend pandemic-era expanded Obamacare subsidies.
While the move may not save the subsidies from expiring, given that Republican-controlled Senate has indicated resistance to the plan, the votes mark the sharpest rebuke of party leadership from within the GOP since President Donald Trump started his second term.
U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who has represented Bucks County since 2017, and two GOP freshmen from elsewhere in the state, U.S. Reps. Rob Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, joined New York moderate Mike Lawler to give Democrats the votes they needed to push a vote on a clean extension of the subsidies to the floor.
The move comes on the heels of other high-profile examples of rank-and-file Republicans bucking Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, including last month’s bipartisan vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, following a discharge petition after Johnson had slow-walked the legislation.
The “dam is breaking,” U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) told CNN on Tuesday in reference to the string of incidents in which members of the party had defied the president and speaker ahead of next year’s midterms.
The Republicans who defected on the healthcare bill had favored a compromise that they hoped might have a chance of passing Congress, but that was rejected by Johnson (R., La.), who sided with conservatives against expanding the subsidies, on Tuesday night.
That left them supporting a vote on a bill that extends the program as is, with far fewer restrictions and concessions than the compromise bills included.
“Despite our months-long call for action, leadership on both sides of the aisle failed to work together to advance any bipartisan compromise, leaving this as the only way to protect the 28,000 people in my district from higher costs,” Bresnahan said in a statement posted on X.
“Families in NEPA cannot afford to have the rug pulled out from under them. Doing nothing was not an option, and although this is not a bill I ever intended to support, it is the only option remaining. I urge my colleagues to set politics aside, put people first, and come together around a bipartisan deal.”
Later Wednesday, House Republican leaders pushed to passage a healthcare bill that does not address the soaring monthly premiums that millions of people will soon endure. The bill passed on a mostly party-line vote of 216-211. U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) joined with Democrats in voting against the measure.
Fitzpatrick and Lawler tried to add a temporary extension of the subsidies to the bill, but were denied.
“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. Then, at the request of House leadership I, along with my colleagues, filed multiple amendments, and testified at length to those amendments,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. “House leadership then decided to reject every single one of these amendments.
“As I’ve stated many times before, the only policy that is worse than a clean three-year extension without any reforms, is a policy of complete expiration without any bridge,” Fitzpatrick said.
Bresnahan’s vote for the discharge petition came a little more than a week after he welcomed Trump to his Northeast Pennsylvania district for a rally, which was meant to address voter concerns about affordability ahead of next year’s midterms.
Bresnahan won his election last year by about 1 percentage point. He was also one of just 20 House Republicans to sign a successful discharge petition earlier this month to force a vote for collective bargaining to be restored for federal workers.
“At the end of the day that might have been going against party leadership, but it was what’s right for northeastern Pennsylvania,” he told The Inquirer of the vote at the Pennsylvania Society last weekend.
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pennsylvania) speaks at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Dec. 3.
Mackenzie, in an interview with The Inquirer, blamed Democrats for not signing on to one of the compromise proposals, leaving him and the other three Republicans with no alternative but to sign onto a discharge for a plan he doubts will pass.
“But if you send the Senate anything at this point, I’m of the opinion it will continue the conversation and they’ll consider what their options are,” Mackenzie said. “If they would like to do additional reforms, I welcome those.”
While Republicans who have opposed the extension argue the subsidies were meant to be temporary and affect only about 7% of Americans, Mackenzie said he has been hearing from constituents constantly.
“Healthcare and the current system is unaffordable for many people,” he said. “We recognize the current system is broken for millions of Americans, so to actually get to some kind of better position, you need both short-term and long-term solutions.”
He called the Affordable Care Act subsidy extension a needed short-term solution “to do something for people struggling right now.”
Like Bresnahan, Mackenzie won his Lehigh Valley seat by 1 percentage point last year. And the district will be a top priority for both parties in next year’s election — as shown by Vice President JD Vance’s visit there Tuesday.
U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a staunch Trump ally, represents a swing district in Central Pennsylvania but voted against the discharge petition. Janelle Stelson, a Democrat seeking Perry’s seat, called him “extreme” for voting against the measure.
“While other Republicans are working across party lines to lower costs, Perry is yet again refusing to do anything to make life more affordable,” said Stelson, who narrowly lost to Perry last year.
Some Republicans do not want to extend the credits at all, while others want abortion restrictions included.
Democrats hoping to unseat Fitzpatrick argue he has a record of pushing back on Trump and GOP leaders only in ways that do not actually damage the party or its priorities. In this case, though, the three Pennsylvanians were critical in getting the petition through, even if the future of ACA tax credits remains uncertain.
“The only thing Brian Fitzpatrick has perfected in his 9 years in Congress is the art of completely meaningless gesture, designed to protect his political future not the people he serves,” his Democratic challenger, Bucks County Commissioner Bob Harvie, wrote on X.
Harvie had previously called on Fitzpatrick to sign the Democrats’ discharge petition.
Not all ACA tax credits are under threat. Under the ACA, people who earn less than 400% of the federal poverty level — about $60,000 — are eligible for tax credits on a sliding scale, based on their income, to help offset the monthly cost of an insurance premium.
That tax credit is part of the law, and therefore not expiring. But what will expire is an expansion passed in 2021 when Congress increased financial assistance so that those buying coverage through an Obamacare marketplace do not pay more than 8.5% of their income.
This article includes information from the Associated Press.
Back in 1951, a teenage Barbara Rose Johns led a walkout at her segregated high school in Virginia that would go on to contribute to the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Now, a statue of her is on display in the U.S. Capitol, replacing a sculpture of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
“The Commonwealth of Virginia will now be properly represented by an actual patriot who embodied the principle of liberty and justice for all,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) said at a ceremony Tuesday unveiling the statue. “And not a traitor who took up arms against the United States to preserve the brutal institution of chattel slavery.”
And while Johns today is remembered as a seminal civil rights figure who hailed from Virginia, she spent much of her adult life in Philadelphia.
Born in New York City in 1935, Johns as a child moved to Prince Edward County, Va., where she lived on a farm with her grandmother. The county’s public schools were segregated, and in the late 1940s, she began attending an all-Black high school in Farmville known as Robert Russa Moton High School.
Johns, according to the Moton Museum, became frustrated with the poor conditions at the school, which lacked resources and was overcrowded compared with white facilities. In April 1951, when she was 16, she led a walkout with hundreds of other students to protest the conditions, ultimately gaining the support of NAACP lawyers, who filed a lawsuit that challenged the practice of segregated education.
Known as Davis v. Prince Edward, the lawsuit went on to become one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. The high court’s landmark 1954 decision declared “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional. Despite resisting the court’s decision, Prince Edward County schools were ultimately integrated by the mid-1960s.
People take photos of a statue of Virginia civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns, whose statue will replace one of Robert E. Lee as one of Virginia’s two statues on display at the Capitol, at a dedication ceremony Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in Washington.
Following the walkout, Johns’ parents were worried for their daughter’s safety and sent her to live in Montgomery, Ala., where she resided with her uncle, the Rev. Vernon Johns, who was a pastor and civil rights leader in his own right. She completed high school there and studied for a time at Spelman College in Atlanta, according to the Farmville Herald, Farmville’s local newspaper.
In 1954, she married the Rev. William Rowland Powell, and the pair later moved to Philadelphia. As a resident, Johns continued college at Drexel University, from which she graduated in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in library science, according to the 2018 bookRecovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision.
Johns would go on to have five children, and worked for more than 20 years as a librarian for the Philadelphia School District. Public information about her time in Philadelphia is scarce, and neither Drexel nor the school district immediately responded to requests for comment.
On Sept. 25, 1991, Johns died in Philadelphia following a battle with cancer. Her family, the Farmville Herald reported, knew little of activism and her involvement in the Moton walkout, only learning of it late in her life.
The statue of Johns is part of the National Statuary Hall Collection at the Capitol, in which each state can contribute two statues. The other statue representing Virginia is of George Washington.
The National Statuary Hall displays 35 of the statues. Others are in the Crypt, the Hall of Columns, and the Capitol Visitor Center. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said the Johns statue will be placed in the Crypt.
Former Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam had requested the removal of the Lee statue. In December 2020, a state commission recommended replacing Lee’s statue with a statue of Johns. The removal occurred during a time of renewed national attention over Confederate monuments after the death of George Floyd, and the Lee statue was relocated to the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.
Johns is also featured in a sculpture at the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial outside the state Capitol in Richmond. Her former high school is now a National Historic Landmark and museum.
“She was brave, bold, determined, strong, wise, unselfish, warm and loving,” said Terry Harrison, one of her daughters, at Tuesday’s unveiling, according to NPR. “We’re truly grateful that this magnificent monument to her story, the sacrifices that her family and her community made, may continue to inspire and teach others that no matter what, you too can reach for the moon.”
This article contains information from the Associated Press.
