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Brittney Melton
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NPR's senior political editor/correspondent Domenico Montanaro joins the newsletter today to break down the State of the Union address.
President Trump has been facing difficult poll numbers, tied to the economy, specifically prices and the cost of living. But in his first State of the Union address of his second term, Trump ignored those economic warts.
President Donald Trump delivers his State of the Union address during a Joint Session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on February 24. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption
Instead, he boasted that "our nation is back" and that it had achieved a "turnaround for the ages." It all amounted to a long speech — record-setting, in fact — that hit familiar Trump notes on immigration and culture, with a healthy amount of the usual showmanship.
Here are five takeaways from the speech:
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The House of Representatives narrowly rejected a bipartisan aviation safety bill yesterday. Lawmakers developed the proposed legislation, called the ROTOR Act, after a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger jet collided midair near Washington, D.C. last year, killing 67 people. Safety investigators and the victims' families backed the bill, yet the Pentagon withdrew its support just before the vote.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is threatening to blacklist Anthropic after the artificial intelligence company refused to loosen its safety standards for the military. During a meeting with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Hegseth vowed to punish the company for denying the Trump administration's demands, according to two people with direct knowledge of the meeting who were not authorized to speak publicly. One person said that Hegseth suggested the Pentagon could cancel Anthropic's $200 million contract. A Pentagon official said repercussions could include the government seizing Anthropic's AI tools for use against the company's will.
The front lobby of the Miami Immigration Court seen on Jan. 28, 2026 in Miami, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide caption
The Trump administration fired nearly 100 judges in 2025 as part of a larger push to reshape U.S. immigration courts. These firings, as well as resignations, shrunk the number of judges in the nation's immigration courts by about a quarter in the last year, even when accounting for new hires. The Justice Department Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) lost more than 400 legal assistants, attorney advisers and legal administrative specialists, according to data NPR obtained and verified. While the administration defends its personnel decisions as a necessary correction to "lenient" asylum rulings, the drain has crushed staff morale, bloated backlogs and left the due process system floundering.
Pianist-composer Vadim Neselovskyi drew on the pain and suffering caused by the war in Ukraine, but also hope for the future, for his piano and strings suite, Perseverantia. Arkady Mitnik hide caption
Ukrainian pianist and composer Vadim Neselovskyi was born in Odesa, a city that Russia has repeatedly bombed since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He channels this horror into his latest album, titled Perseverantia. The 11-part suite for piano and strings combines classical and jazz, capturing the sounds of war, empathy and hope. In an interview with Morning Edition, Neselovskyi explained that, despite how music plays a big part in his life, he was unable to play for three weeks after the Russian invasion. When he finally approached the piano, he played brutal chords that later became the basis of the suite's second movement, "Tanks Near Kyiv." That is when he realized that instrumental music could deliver a message that words couldn't. Listen to snippets of his new album and read more about how Neselovskyi composed his songs.
Horses, like the Norwegian Fjord variety apparently yawning in this image, generate both a high frequency and a low frequency when they whinny. ullstein bild/Getty Images hide caption
This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.
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