The Headlines - Trump’s New Ultimatum for Putin, and an Epstein Backlash

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Plus, the origins of an iconic TV theme song.On Today’s Episode:Behind Trump’s Tough Russia Talk, Doubts and Missing Details, by Michael Crowley, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. BarnesSupreme Court Clears the Way for Trump’s Cuts to the Education Department, by Abbie VanSickle24 States Sue Trump Over $6.8 Billion Withheld From Education, by Sarah MervoshWill the Conspiracists Cultivated by Trump Turn on Him Over Epstein?, by Shawn McCreeshHomeless Population Declines in Los Angeles for a Second Straight Year, by Shawn HublerMark Snow, Who Conjured the ‘X-Files’ Theme, Is Dead at 78, 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's Tuesday, July 15th. Here's what we're covering. This is a very big deal with me. This is billions of dollars worth of military equipment is going to be purchased from the United States, going to NATO, et cetera. At the White House on Monday, President Trump officially announced a new U.S. effort to support Ukraine.

His plan includes selling American weapons to Europe that can then be passed on to the front lines, and the threat of sharp new tariffs on Russian trade if Moscow doesn't move quickly toward a peace agreement. It's part of a dramatic shift for Trump, who's gone from praising Vladimir Putin to issuing him a new ultimatum. So if it's not done, if we don't have an agreement in 50 days, that's what we're doing, secondary tariffs. And they're biting.

So as my colleagues and I talk to experts about President Trump's proposals, what we really found was a lot of skepticism that this was going to make a major short-term difference. My colleague Michael Crowley covers US foreign policy for the Times. There are still a lot of big unanswered questions here. For starters, we don't know exactly how many weapons President Trump is proposing to sell to Europe to then be transferred to Ukraine. Moreover, President Trump talked about very severe economic penalties that he would impose on Russia's trading partners. Now Russia makes huge amounts of money selling energy to countries like India and China.

But when you take the example of a country like China, that puts Trump into a major economic confrontation with the world's second largest economy. And we've already seen Trump retreat on huge tariffs that he was going to levy against China. So there's not a lot of reason to think that he's going to follow through with that particular threat. In Washington yesterday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to effectively gut the Department of Education by firing more than a thousand workers.

It's a temporary order, as federal courts consider whether the president has the power to dismantle a department that Congress created. But for now, it allows the firings to proceed. When the president took office, the agency had more than 4,000 employees. Soon, it's expected to have just half that, which could severely affect how the government manages student loans, tracks student achievement, and enforces civil rights in schools. The court gave no reasoning for its decision on the firings. That's standard for an order like this,

which came in response to an emergency application from the Trump administration. The three liberal justices dissented. Meanwhile, in another fight over the education department, two dozen states filed a lawsuit yesterday to try and get access to billions of dollars in school funding that the administration has frozen. With almost no notice, officials announced this summer that they were holding back about

$7 billion, roughly 14% of all federal funding for elementary and secondary education in the U.S. The funds support teacher trainings, after-school care, and English language programs. But the administration has claimed the money was, quote, grossly misused to subsidize a radical left-wing agenda and that they need time to review it. The lawsuit accuses the White House of holding back the money illegally, arguing that it's unconstitutional for the president to refuse to spend money that Congress allotted and approved.

Overall, the administration's push to freeze funding and close the Department of Education altogether is part of a larger Republican effort to roll back support for public education and boost private schools and homeschooling. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. President Trump is struggling to contain an open revolt by some of his most loyal supporters who are upset over how his administration has handled the Jeffrey Epstein case. Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Epstein case. For months, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised the release of revealing documents

about the disgraced financier and sex offender, feeding into conspiracy theories that there could be more damaging details still to come. Then, under her leadership, the Justice Department announced there was really nothing left to see, including no incriminating so-called client list that many theories had focused on. But many of Trump's supporters don't believe that. That's one of the reasons the special prosecutor is needed on Epstein. We have to get to the bottom of who's governing us. And they are not letting it go, leveling more accusations of a coverup.

The Trump administration has become part of it. I mean, you cannot see it any other way. Over the last few days, Trump's tried to tamp things down. He's urged his followers to, quote, not waste time and energy on Epstein. He's defended Bondi and bemoaned the fact that his base is splitting over this, writing, We're on one team, MAGA, and I don't like what's happening. Now Steve Bannon, once one of Trump's closest advisors, is predicting there could be more fallout if the administration continues to dismiss the outcry.

You're going to lose 10% of the MAGA movement. If we lose 10% of the MAGA movement right now, we're going to lose 40 seats in 26. We're going to lose the president. We don't even have to steal it. On an episode of his podcast, The War Room, Bannon said the backlash could spread into the midterms. And one of Bannon's colleagues on the show, Natalie Winters, told The Times, quote, people are really upset. In Los Angeles, a major annual study shows that homelessness in the region has dropped for the second year in a row.

Compared to two years ago, homelessness in LA County has fallen by 14 percent. One of the most visible signs of the issue, people sleeping on sidewalks or in cars and abandoned buildings, has gone down significantly. The county and the city have made a multi-billion dollar push in recent years to tackle the issue, rolling out rent subsidies and new housing units, along with mental health and addiction outreach. LA's mayor, Karen Bass, celebrated the numbers, which were gathered in February, saying, quote, These results aren't just data points. They represent thousands of human beings who are now inside. Despite the progress, there are still more than 70,000 unhoused

people in L.A. County, and the region faces a severe housing shortage, which was made worse by the wildfires earlier this year that tore through neighborhoods and destroyed thousands of homes. And finally, Mark Snow, the composer who managed to give everyone that eerie, spine-tingling feeling with just a few notes, has died at 78. Snow's theme song for The X-Files stands as one of TV's most iconic. Even just a few seconds of it told you to buckle up for whatever unexplained phenomena FBI agents Mulder and Scully were about to encounter. Snow, who trained at Juilliard, racked up more than 250 TV and film credits over the course of his career.

But The X-Files was his biggest success. At one point, a dance remix of the theme even became a top 10 hit in Europe. When it came to writing the theme in the first place, Snow layered a whole bunch of stuff in there, synthesizer samples, and even the sound of his wife, Glynnis, whistling. But as he once told the Television Foundation Academy, the iconic sound of it really came down to a bit of luck. One day, he accidentally leaned his elbow onto a keyboard

set to that spacey echo delay effect. And it went... Bum, da da da da da da da. I said, oh, that's pretty good. No, I wonder if you do two notes, what's that sound like? Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. How about three? Ba ba ba ba ba ba. How about four?

Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. That's pretty cool, all right. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, the mounting questions about how Texas officials handled the deadly flash floods there earlier this month. That's next in the New York Times audio app, where you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.