The Headlines - Trump’s Major Retreat on Greenland, and Why Texas Hit Pause on New Data Centers

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Plus, El Niño is scrambling hurricane season. Here’s what we’re covering:At the U.N., Trump Lays Out a Winner-Takes-All Vision of U.S. Power, by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and David E. SangerTrump Once Vowed to ‘Own’ Greenland. He Settled for Something Much Less., by David E. Sanger, Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya TekeliTrump Officials Eject 750,000 From Obamacare Markets, Claiming Fraud, by Margot Sanger-Katz, Sarah Kliff and Christopher RowlandTexas Halts Data Center Permits, Expanding Environmental Scrutiny, by Scott Dance‘It’s Really Busy Out There’: Storms in the Pacific Threaten Hawaii and Mexico, by Amy Graff Tune in every weekday morning, and tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Wednesday, September 23rd. Here's what we're covering. While others have talked of courage, America has shown it. While others have promised strength, I have used it to make America the most powerful country in the world. At the United Nations yesterday, President Trump laid out a vision for a winner-takes-all world order in a speech that was effectively a rejection of the founding principles of the UN.

We are reasserting American power, including American military power, where necessary, in our region and around the world. When the UN was established after World War II, its aim was to, quote, save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, as it said in its charter, which was written largely by the U.S. But from the stage yesterday, Trump took a strikingly aggressive tone. He promised that Cuba's government would fall, and he justified his administration's sweeping claims on Venezuelan oil by saying, to the victor belong the spoils. He also renewed his scorched earth threats against Iran.

Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations? At the same time, other world leaders pushed back on Trump's vision of a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest world, even if they didn't name Trump directly. The president of France warned against returning to the, quote, law of the jungle, and the leader of Angola described the world as being in the midst of global anarchy, quote, in which the use of force prevails over the force of reason and law. Meanwhile, with world leaders gathered in New York for the UN General Assembly, President Trump signed a security agreement over Greenland.

Over the last year and a half, Trump repeatedly demanded that the island become part of the U.S., even threatening to take it by force, saying it was crucial for national security for the U.S. to have a bigger foothold in the Arctic. The new agreement marks a major retreat from the height of those threats. It explicitly does not give any territory to the U.S. It does pave the way for the U.S. to expand its military presence on the island, including by opening new bases, though an existing treaty from the 1950s already allowed for that. We are stopping Obamacare enrollment for about 750,000 people, 750,000 people who we believe are fraudulently enrolled in the program.

In Washington yesterday, Vice President J.D. Vance held a press conference to announce that the administration has ejected several hundred thousand people from the Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces. We're actually making sure that the people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them. Amazingly, we weren't doing that before. Vance estimated that the move will save the government over $2 billion. In total, the number of people cut off from the marketplaces amounts to about 4% of the Americans who get health insurance that way. And Vance said they're investigating about a half a million other enrollees as well.

The announcement was the latest initiative by an anti-eastern. fraud task force that Vance leads, which has been frequently focused on federal health programs. My colleague Margot Sanger Katz, who covers public health, has started looking into who has lost their coverage. The Trump administration has been talking a lot about fraud in the Obamacare marketplaces, and there is some evidence of some fishy enrollment, both brokers who may have signed people up without their knowledge in order to collect commissions, and some weird clustering of enrollments that look suspicious. But when we asked the Trump administration how they found this group of people who they were describing in a press conference as fraudsters, they said that

these were people who had some data mistakes on their application and they asked insurers to contact them and give them 30 days to reply and sort it out. And the people that failed to do that have been disenrolled. So I think it's possible that some of these people were doing something wrong, but it's also possible that some of them just were a little sloppy in the way that they filled out their applications and they didn't respond quickly enough to outreach. Margot says the administration itself acknowledged there may be people who had their coverage canceled who shouldn't have, and it has set up a system for them to get reinstated. Overall, enrollment in coverage sold in Obamacare Marketplaces had already fallen by several

million people this year after Congress did not extend subsidies that had made coverage less expensive. Less than a year ago, Texas will be the centerpiece for AI data centers for Google. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, said the state would be the epicenter of AI development, with dozens and dozens of large data center projects underway there. They will be net positive to the power grid, making sure we have the reliability and the supply that Texas needs to keep the lights on. But now, Abbott has ordered Texas regulators to pause that boom and halt their reviews of any

new permit applications for data centers until the state can evaluate how they affect the power grid and water supplies. According to one study from the University of Texas at Austin, data centers could use up to 9% of the state's water by 2040. Texas is not the first state to pump. the brakes on data centers, but Abbott's U-turn is notable given how enthusiastically Texas had embraced the projects. According to the Pew Research Center, the state has more than 400 data centers in operation or being planned, the second most in the country just behind Virginia. Abbott's sharp pivot now speaks to how intense the backlash to data centers has become,

as Americans across the political spectrum raise concerns about. rising electric bills and noise and air pollution. And finally, usually this time of year is the peak of hurricane season in the Atlantic, the busiest time for storms to spin up and barrel towards land. But this year, not a single hurricane has formed there, something that hasn't happened in more than eight decades. There have been a handful of named storms in the Atlantic, but none strong enough to reach hurricane status.

at the same time. We have one, two, three hurricanes active right now in the Pacific. The hurricane season in the Pacific has been wild. Southern California now on high alert for impacts later in the week. We are already on the P-storm in the East Pacific Polo. It exploded. A supercharged hurricane named Polo off the coast of Mexico is now the second most intense Pacific hurricane on record.

The good news is that while it's super powerful, it's expected to stay mostly over the ocean. The oddity of this year's storm count can be explained by El Nino. The weather pattern has stifled tropical activity in the Atlantic while fueling storms in the Pacific. Experts have described El Nino as basically the planet's naturally recurring chaos agent. Those are the headlines. Today on the Daily, the app is tracking the baby's mood. It logs when they woke up, when they fell asleep. It can see when their eyes open and close. A look at the rise of health tracking technology focused on babies.

And whether having all that data is useful or if it just fuels parents' anxieties. You can find that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are not a time subscriber yet, you can get a full month of free access to all of the journalism we public. when you download the Times app now. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.