The Headlines - Trump’s Loyalty Test, and a Chaotic Deportation Hearing

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Plus, “Norm!” On Today’s Episode: Trump Squeezes His Party on Domestic Policy Bill as G.O.P. Hunts for Votes, by Catie Edmondson, Maya C. Miller and Robert JimisonJudge Orders U.S. to Keep Custody of Migrants Amid Claims They Were Sent to South Sudan, by Hamed Aleaziz, Alan Feuer and Mattathias SchwartzNoem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People, by Michael GoldTrump Unveils Plans for ‘Golden Dome’ Missile Defense System, by Erica L. GreenElon Musk Plans ‘a Lot Less’ Spending as He Edges Away From Politics, by Theodore Schleifer, Ryan Mac and Maggie HabermanIn Approving Soda Ban for Food Stamps, U.S.D.A. Reverses Decades of Policy, by Linda QiuGoogle Unveils A.I. Chatbot, Signaling a New Era for Search, by Tripp MickleGeorge Wendt, a.k.a. Norm From ‘Cheers,’ Is Dead at 76, by Alex WilliamsTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Wednesday, May 21st. Here's what we're covering. In the House of Representatives, Republican leadership is trying everything they can to push through the spending legislation that's key to President Trump's policy agenda. It's supposed to deliver on a lot of Trump's campaign promises, like tax cuts, including eliminating taxes on tips and overtime pay.

It also raises spending on military and immigration enforcement, while cutting funds for Medicaid, food stamps, and clean energy initiatives. But even after days of negotiations, there's still a small but significant number of Republican holdouts, most of whom want to see deeper cuts. The GOP can't afford not to have their support with the narrow margin in the House. So yesterday, the president himself went to Capitol Hill to try and bring the pressure. And we're going to have a bill, the one big, beautiful bill I think it's going to be. It's the biggest bill ever passed, and we got to get it done. And in a closed-door meeting with Republicans,

Trump made clear he sees the package as a loyalty test to him, saying anyone who won't get on board, quote, wouldn't be a Republican much longer. We're told from people who were in the meeting that the president didn't mince words and didn't hold back. But the question is, did the pressure from the president and this face-to-face conversation have any impact? Robert Jemison covers Congress for the Times. President Trump does have a successful

history of swaying Republicans in the House when it comes to pieces of legislation. But this time, it's a little bit different because the stakes are much higher. This is probably one of the best chances Republicans may have during his entire administration to enact so many of these policy agendas. And it comes with a significantly large price tag. And some Republicans say that they won't budge until they can scale some of those pieces back and enact more savings. One of the biggest points of debate about the bill is what it will mean for Medicaid.

10 million Americans are expected to lose their insurance if it passes as written. And some of the GOP holdouts want even more Medicaid changes, while more moderate Republicans have been fighting that. The president seems to be on their side. One lawmaker in the meeting said Trump told the holdouts, quote, don't cut Medicaid, just shut up about it. At the Capitol, the Rules Committee met all night to try and hash out potential compromises around the bill.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has insisted that it get a full vote this week before Memorial Day. In federal court in Boston yesterday, a judge ordered the Trump administration to stop what migrants' lawyers said was another attempt to deport people to countries they are not from. His order came as an unknown number of migrants were being flown to an unknown destination. Immigration lawyers at the hearing said at least two migrants had been told they were being sent to South Sudan, where neither is from, a country the State Department advises people not to travel to due to violence.

This was a pretty chaotic hearing. The judge asked repeatedly where the plane was. The government at one point said that that information was classified. Then there was a break. They brought in the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, who said he didn't know if the information was classified, but that it didn't really matter for the purposes of

the hearing because he didn't know where the plane was. So the judge had a lot of questions and the government did not have the answers he wanted. My colleague, Matatya Schwartz, was covering the hearing. He says that last month, the same judge, Brian Murphy, ordered the government not to deport people to third-party countries, like El Salvador, where they'd sent some flights, without giving migrants enough time to challenge that. The judge warned the latest flight may have violated his order, saying, quote, based on what had been told, this seems like it may be contempt. He did not order the plane to turn around, but he did say any migrants in Department

of Homeland Security custody must not leave U.S. control once the plane landed, at least until a hearing today to determine if they received adequate due process. Secretary Noem, the White House deputy chief of staff recently said that the Trump administration is actively looking at suspending habeas corpus. Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, faced questions yesterday from senators about the administration's efforts to speed up deportations. And she misstated a key legal principle. So Secretary Noem, what is habeas corpus?

Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to… Let me stop you now. Noem incorrectly described habeas corpus as a presidential authority to remove people from the U.S. It's actually a foundational principle of the Constitution that protects people from unlawful detention. Only Congress has the power to suspend it.

Now three more quick updates on the Trump administration. Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles, even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space. In the Oval Office yesterday, President Trump unveiled plans for a nationwide air defense system dubbed the Golden Dome. He said the project would get an initial $25 billion

from the spending bill that's currently in front of Congress, and that he's confident the system will be operational by the end of his term. But federal officials have estimated it could cost upwards of half a trillion dollars to get it fully up and running. And while it's modeled off of Israel's so-called Iron Dome, covering the U.S., which is 400 times larger, will present major technical challenges. Also, in terms of political spending, I'm going to do a lot less in the future.

And why is that? I think I've done enough. In the latest sign that Elon Musk is taking a step back from politics, he said in interviews on Tuesday that he's planning to wind down his campaign contributions and spend less time in Washington, D.C. Musk was the biggest donor of the 2024 election and was a fixture of Trump's first months in office. But the slash and burn campaign that his Department of Government efficiency carried out has generated

intense political backlash that has threatened the profits of some of his companies. And for the first time in the U.S., federal officials have approved an effort to ban people from using food stamps to buy soda and energy drinks. Starting next year, Nebraska plans to put the new limitations on residents who get government food assistance, and at least eight other states are also considering similar restrictions. This kind of ban on sugary drinks failed to get traction for decades because of pushback from food industry trade groups

and people who argued that the government shouldn't get to tell people what they can drink. Under the Trump administration though, with health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others saying they want to target processed foods and tackle obesity, the effort now seems to be gaining new momentum. In Mountain View, California yesterday, Google announced it's making a major new update to its iconic search engine as it tries to keep up

in Silicon Valley's AI arms race. The classic list of blue links that it serves up isn't going away, but now users in the US will see a new tab called AI mode that's, well, a lot like ChatGPT where you can basically have a conversation with the search engine. When ChatGPT, where you can basically have a conversation with the search engine. When ChatGPT launched a few years ago, Google declared Code Red,

warning that the rise of chatbots could upend its search business, which brings in almost $200 billion a year. It's been trying to figure out how to compete. Over the years, it's introduced some AI features of its own, like those little AI summaries that pop up at the top of searches. The company said that's been a success. It's actually led to people using the site more.

Still, there have been a lot of questions swirling about Google's turn to AI, even within the company, including how they'll monetize the new features and the fact that AI chatbots often kick out answers that are just wrong. And finally... Afternoon, everybody! No! The actor George Wendt, who played a beloved beer-chugging bar regular on Cheers for over a decade has died at 76. Well, I am going to need something to kill time before my second beer.

How about a first one? As Norm, he arrived at the bar day after day without fail as Cheers went on to become the most popular show on television in the late 80s and early 90s. Norm was the regular guy, the everyman, when once said, quote, he was the prototypical slacker. That's why he was so popular. The actor was born and raised in Chicago, one of nine kids. He went to Notre Dame for a few years before he had to drop out with a 0.0 GPA.

He got a start in entertainment at Second City, the improv comedy club in Chicago that's launched the careers of John Belushi, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler. But Wendt wasn't on stage originally. His job was sweeping the floors. Asked how he ended up in TV, Wendt once said, I knew that I didn't want to do something that I hated. It was a process of elimination. Salesman? No. Doctor? No. Lawyer, no. Acting sounded pretty good. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.