Daniel Bach

Here's your morning brief for Wednesday, February 25th.

I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal.

Market sentiment has lifted this morning following President Trump's relatively uneventful State of the Union address.

President Trump uses his State of the Union to celebrate an economic turnaround many voters aren't seeing.

Plus, Warner says Paramount's sweetened offer could, well, best Netflix.

And Anthropic says competition could lead it to relax the AI safety rules it's known for.

It's Wednesday, February 25th.

I'm Daniel Bach for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for Luke Vargas.

And here's the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

We begin in Washington, where President Trump has given the longest State of the Union address in U.S.

history, referring to his first year in office as a turnaround for the ages.

In a speech full of showmanship and patriotism, Trump celebrated his immigration enforcement operations and heralded his economic agenda, at a time when polls show him struggling to connect with the public on the economy and Republicans bracing for a challenging midterm election.

Our White House reporter, Meredith McGraw, has been covering the speech from Washington throughout the night and joins me now.

Meredith, what did you make of the address?

At the top of the speech, you seem to focus on the economic agenda because that is where Trump has staked his claim.

And it's a big deal for Republicans in the next year ahead of the midterms, right?

A key economic plank for the president, of course, is his tariffs.

He doubled down on those despite some of the Supreme Court justices being in the chamber.

We mentioned immigration off the top.

That sparked some of the more heated moments on the evening, including an exchange of words with Democratic lawmaker Ilhan Omar.