Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning. It's Thursday, December 18th. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, the story behind a unique new statue in the Capitol, how the president is trying to free a MAGA loyalist, and the next person in charge of our missions to space is confirmed.
But first, last night, President Trump gave a primetime address to the nation, focused mostly on the state of the economy. During the speech, he attacked Democrats, blaming them for increased prices across the board and other issues, while giving himself credit for solving those problems.
Here at home, we're bringing our economy back from the brink of ruin. The last administration and their allies in Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before. I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.
The president also said that in just under a year, he brought the country back from the brink.
One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally failed. Now, we're the hottest country anywhere in the world.
The combative speech comes at a moment when Trump has struggled to assuage concerns among voters that the general cost of living in the United States is still stubbornly high. What has been a political strength of Trump's, one that he used to help win his second term in the White House, is now his own cross to bear in a sense.
Despite the president's claims during his address that prices for things like plane tickets, gas and groceries are all falling on his watch, the public at large hasn't really agreed with that.
The main promise he made was to lower consumer costs on day one. And now he's really painted himself into a corner because there actually isn't very much the president can do to lower consumer costs by himself.
Jacob Bogage is the White House economic correspondent for The Washington Post. A new poll from PBS News, NPR, and Marist found that 36% of Americans approve of Trump's handling of the economy. That marks the lowest in their polling on the issue across his two terms in office. A recent AP poll found similar levels of dissatisfaction.
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Chapter 2: What did President Trump say about the economy during his primetime address?
military. Meanwhile, the White House is also actively trying to message to voters that they're working on the affordability crisis. Just this week, Vice President J.D. Vance made a stop in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, bearing that message.
Bogage told us that while Republicans close to Trump believe he has delivered on eliminating regulatory red tape in addition to tax hikes and cuts, Americans are just still unhappy with how things are going.
They feel the economy legitimately is on pretty steady footing, that consumers have the resources to keep up with prices, that their wages are rising to keep up with prices, and that they are all in all on pretty good footing, and yet they're not getting credit for it.
On the employment front, figures released this week showed the U.S. added 64,000 jobs in November but lost 105,000 in October. Those job losses include thousands of federal workers who accepted delayed resignations. The unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.6%, the highest since 2021.
The frustrating thing for the president and for the Republican Party, and I don't know how they wiggle their way out of this, is they ran for office by promising these instant economic results and conditioning voters to believe that they were achievable. Now that they can't achieve them because they promised some impossible results, how do you put the genie back in the bottle there?
You can't do it.
President Trump has embraced the power of pardons in his second term, granting clemency to more than 1,700 people. But there's one MAGA loyalist that Trump wants to free but can't. Tina Peters was a Colorado county clerk convicted last year for tampering with voting equipment under her control after the 2020 election.
Handing down the sentence, the judge didn't hold back in his assessment of Peter's character.
You are no hero. You abused your position. And you're a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again.
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Chapter 3: Why do everyday Americans feel differently about the economy than Trump claims?
Let's talk about a story now out of Washington that flew under the radar this week, about a historic figure you might not be very familiar with, and a statue that honors her story. Barbara Rose Johns, then a 16-year-old Black teenager, led a protest in the early 1950s that contributed to profound changes in the country.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries gathered in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol to unveil her new statue.
Today we are here to honor one of America's true trailblazers, a woman who embodied the essence of the American spirit in her fight for liberty and justice and equal treatment under the law, the indomitable Barbara Rose Johns. Thank you all for being part of this.
The Commonwealth of Virginia will now be properly represented by an actual patriot, who embodied the principle of liberty and justice for all.
And what she's best known for is leading a walkout at her Virginia high school to protest the conditions there and advocate for more equal facilities compared to the white high school. And that case pretty directly led to Brown v. Board of Ed, which ended school segregation in the U.S.
That's Rachel Triesman, a reporter who covered the unveiling for NPR. Now, the hall is unique because every state legislature gets to select two notable people from its history to be represented there. Virginia has George Washington, and for more than a century, it had Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
But back in 2020, Ralph Northam, the former Democratic governor of Virginia, requested that Lee's statue be removed, and a state commission selected Barbara Rose Johns in his place. Treesman told us a bit about Barbara's life story. She was born in New York, but went to school in Farmville, Virginia, where she started to notice how inferior her school was compared to the one for white kids.
classrooms were in these freestanding tar paper shacks they didn't have plumbing or heat and of course they didn't have facilities like science labs or a gym or an athletic field and over the years it seems like she grew increasingly frustrated we know from some of her writings that she took her concerns to a teacher and the teacher basically said why don't you do something about it and she got to thinking about it and decided to take it upon herself to try to change that
And in 1951, she gathered all 450 students and organized a mass walkout. Her sister Joan Johns Cobbs was by her side that day. And in 2019, she spoke to The 74, an education news site.
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Chapter 4: What actions has the administration taken to address cost of living concerns?
And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.