The Headlines - Trump’s New Charm Offensive, and a Drone Attack on Moscow

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Plus, a D.O.J. dust-up over Mel Gibson. On Today’s Episode:House Republicans Unveil Spending Bill to Avert Shutdown at Week’s End, by Catie Edmondson and Carl HulseTrump, With More Honey Than Vinegar, Cements an Iron Grip on Republicans, by Annie Karni and Jonathan SwanTrump Promised Americans Booming Wealth. Now He’s Changing His Tune, by Tyler PagerJustice Dept. Official Says She Was Fired After Opposing Restoring Mel Gibson’s Gun Rights, by Devlin BarrettUkraine Bombards Russia, Forcing Moscow Airports to Close, by Marc Santora and Ivan NechepurenkoRodrigo Duterte, Philippine Ex-President, Is Arrested on I.C.C. Warrant, by Sui-Lee Wee and Camille Elemia15 Lessons Scientists Learned About Us When the World Stopped, by Claire Cain Miller and Irineo CabrerosTune 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's Tuesday, March 11th. Here's what we're covering. The House of Representatives may vote as soon as today on a stopgap funding measure to keep the government running. Without it, the government will shut down Friday at midnight. The bill, which was drafted by Republicans, calls for a slight decrease in overall spending, but increases the military budget by $6 billion. It's also got a half-billion-dollar bump for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a half-billion more for WIC, the federal program that provides groceries to low-income women and children. The GOP

will need nearly every vote of their razor-thin majority to pass it. And previously, some conservative members have held out against this kind of spending bill. But now, President Trump is stepping up the pressure on them to push it through and avoid what could be a potentially embarrassing shutdown. I've been talking to current lawmakers, former lawmakers, people who have been around Trump working for him just to get a sense of how does he kind of control House Republicans? How does he go about getting them to vote the way he needs them to vote? Annie Carney covers Congress for the Times. She says that where in his first term, Trump

relied on a kind of bad cop approach, making political threats, there's been less of that this time around, more good cop. So he is using the carrot more to appeal to them, the nice guy, the charm offensive. He knows these members really well. A lot of them have his cell phone. He texts them when he sees them on TV. He invites them to dinner at Mar-a-Lago and encourages them to bring their families.

Then a lot of these members relate to him sort of like as fans of a big celebrity who come with paraphernalia that they want him to sign. And that makes them feel special and it really works. A few people told me this anecdote that, you know, he'll take you on Air Force One or Marine One and not only will he give you a ride, but he will sit you next to him and say, you know whose seat that is, that's Melania's seat. Only Melania sits there. Look how special you are. Only you have sat there. Like, he says that to everybody, but it's sort of flattery and they know what's on the other side of it. They know there's two modes, that like, if it's not that mode, it's threatening to end your political career.

So there's no in-between, and they prefer this mode. [♪MUSIC PLAYING》 [♪MUSIC FADES》 And there is your closing bell on Wall Street. Yeah, it's a tough one. It was another ugly day for stocks, and concerns over tariffs and a slowing economy. All major stock indices are now below the levels they were when Donald Trump was inaugurated.

On Wall Street, stocks took a nosedive yesterday. The markets had their steepest decline of the year. It's part of what's been a weeks-long sell-off that's largely been driven by President Trump's chaotic rollout of new tariffs. Many business leaders supported Donald Trump in his run for president because they thought he would usher in this booming era of economic growth and were hoping Trump would be a president that was more sympathetic to their interests.

However, they've been frustrated not just by the tariffs themselves, but also by the uncertainty. My colleague Tyler Pager has been covering the stock market fallout. He says business leaders are warning that Trump's on-again-off-again approach to the tariffs means they can't plan new hiring or investments. Still, Trump has promised more tariffs. He says they're intended to reset what he calls unfair trade relationships and that they'll bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

We know that Donald Trump pays close attention to the stock market and uses it as a barometer for his own success. And so the question hanging over Washington and really the entire world is how long the president is willing to stomach the pain of not just declining markets, but also negative media coverage. And if he's willing to sustain that over time as these terrorists continue to inflict economic pain, not just on Americans, but across the global economy. The Times has learned that a Justice Department attorney was fired after she refused to help restore gun rights to a prominent supporter of President Trump, Mel Gibson. Gibson, the Hollywood actor, lost his right to own a firearm after a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence in 2011.

About two weeks ago, the government attorney, Elizabeth Oyer, was put on a working group that was told to generate a list of people who the DOJ thought were good candidates to have their gun rights restored. Oyer told the Times that the list she helped put together was mostly people who had decades-old convictions and who they deemed unlikely to commit new crimes. But after they finalized the list, the Deputy Attorney General's Office told them to add Gibson's name. They included a letter from Gibson's attorney asking to get his gun rights back, saying he'd made a number of successful movies and that Trump had tapped him to be what the president called a special ambassador to Hollywood. Oyer says she refused.

She had concerns about giving gun rights back to someone convicted of domestic abuse when she hadn't had time to fully consider the case. Hours later, she got a call from a senior Justice Department official. He told her Gibson had a personal relationship with President Trump, which should be enough to recommend restoring his rights. After she chose not to make that recommendation a second time, Oyer was fired and escorted out of the office. A DOJ official tells the Times that the firing had nothing to do with Gibson. For the moment, the government hasn't released a list of anyone whose gun rights will be restored. After weeks of relentless Russian drone attacks coming nearly every night, Ukraine launched its own bombardment against Moscow this morning. The mayor of Moscow called it the largest

attack on the city in the war so far. Authorities say at least two people were killed and 14 were injured. The airports in Moscow were forced to close temporarily. The strikes came just hours before delegations from Kiev and the United States are set to meet to discuss a possible path to ending the war. The attack appeared intended to serve as a reminder that Ukraine still has the capacity to fight back against Russia.

In the Philippines today, the country's former president, In the Philippines today, the country's former president, Rodrigo Duterte, was arrested on a warrant from the International Criminal Court for his brutal war on drugs. When Duterte took office in 2016, he vowed to crack down violently on drug traffickers and drug users, saying he would be happy to, quote, slaughter anyone who was addicted. According to human rights groups, roughly 30,000 people were executed by police forces and vigilantes who Duterte empowered and encouraged. The ICC said his actions amounted to crimes against humanity

and it plans to fly him to the Hague where the court is based for a trial. Family members of those who were killed in the crackdown applauded the arrest as a step towards justice. So far, only a handful of people have been prosecuted in connection with the killings. And finally, five years ago this week, offices, schools, and shops began to close down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whole streets and neighborhoods went dark as people who could stay home did.

For researchers, the massive upheaval created conditions that never would have happened otherwise. They could suddenly see what it looked like when everything people took as normal stopped. The Times has gathered some of the unexpected discoveries from that period. One researcher found that high heels really are dangerous. Up until 2020, the data showed roughly 16,000 people a year came into ERs with injuries like fractures or sprains from

wearing heels. When he looked at the data from 2020, those dropped by more than half. In sports, studies showed that having fans at the game could be what really makes that home field advantage. Teams who played in their own empty stadiums, maybe with just cardboard cutouts watching them, had poorer performance without all that in-person support. And in the animal world, researchers found that when humans aren't as active, animals

began breeding more and traveling farther. Sea turtles laid more eggs, and dolphins talked more. Without humans around, they whistled for longer. Those are the headlines today on The Daily. What President Trump wants from Greenland and what the people who live there think about his calls to make it part of the US. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.