Up First from NPR - Saudi Uranium Enrichment Deal, Trump Defends Iran War, GOP Congress Out Of Sync

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Saudi Arabia is getting American nuclear reactors and a path to enrich its own uranium, the same technology the U.S. has spent months bombing Iran to stop, which has Israel warning about a nuclear arms race. President Trump is asking Americans to be patient about what the war is costing them, promising Iran will pay for itself the way he claims Venezuela has, but his own supporters are getting harder to convince as gas prices climb again. And the House heads home for a month today after cramming in four big bills on the way out, none of which the Senate is likely to take up as written, even though Republicans run both chambers.Want more analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter.Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Tina Kraja, Rebekah Metzler, Jason Breslow, Mohamad ElBardicy and Adriana Gallardo.It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Nia Dumas.Our director is Christopher Thomas.We get engineering support from Neisha Heinis. Our technical director is Stacey Abbott.And our deputy Executive Producer is Kelley Dickens.(0:00) Introduction(01:55) Saudi Uranium Enrichment Deal(05:26) Trump Defends Iran War(09:03) GOP Congress Out Of SyncSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

President Trump went to war with Iran to stop it from enriching uranium. Now he signed a deal that could let Saudi Arabia do just that. Will the deal spark a Middle East nuclear arms race? I'm Michelle Martin. That's A. Martinez. And this is up first from NPR News. President Trump is threatening to bomb bridges and power plants in Iran and is telling his supporters the war is a win. He says military action in Iran will pay for itself,

the way he claims it did in Venezuela. But with gas prices up again, are MAGA voters losing patience. And Republicans in Congress are working to get a lot done before a month-long summer break. The legislation that just passed the House will need to be overhauled to get through the Senate. Both chambers are led by Republicans, so why aren't they in sync? Stay with us. We've got news you need to start your day. The U.S. has agreed to build and run nuclear energy plants in Saudi Arabia. The Gulf State is rich in oil, but it's been trying to pivot to other energy sources.

And while Saudi Arabia's crown prince has said the kingdom does not want nuclear weapons, he has also said Riyadh will pursue one if Iran develops a nuclear weapon first. With us now is MPR's Emily Fang in Tel Aviv. Emily, so this agreement first tell us what's in it, and actually, too, what's not. So it would allow American companies to run commercial nuclear power plants on Saudi soil for decades to come. And under the agreement, Saudi Arabia is not permitted to reprocess American nuclear material for weapons. But there is nothing in this agreement and a security protocol attached that stops the kingdom from using these plants to say, enrich uranium or other nuclear fuel that's provided by other countries, something that the U.S. made the United Arab Emirates, another Gulf country promised not to do in a previous energy deal back in 2009. So this agreement is sending shock waves through the Middle East and especially in Israel, where I am right now, because Saudi Arabia has been angling for nuclear cooperation with the U.S. for at least.

a decade. And there had been questions about the kingdom's human rights abuses, including from then-Senator and now Secretary of State, Marker Rubio, and also Saudi Arabia's possible aspirations for a nuclear weapon, and all that stalled energy cooperation until now. Now, the U.S. Energy Department argues this deal expands American technology exports, and the agreement does tie the U.S. and Saudi Arabia closer together at a time when Gulf states, including the Kingdom of South, have really paid a price for aligning with the U.S. because they are still getting hit hard by Iranian drone and artillery strikes in a war with Iran that the U.S. started. And they're also dealing with the resulting economic shock

because Saudi Arabia has seen its ability to export oil curtailed. Now, although Israel has never confirmed this, it's widely believed Israel has nuclear weapons already, considering that you are there and you said that it has sent shockwaves to Israel. What's been the reaction there? Israel is alarmed, to say the least. former defense minister and foreign minister, Avedo Lieberman here, criticized this agreement on the public broadcaster yesterday.

Saying here that at risk pulling the entire Middle East into an escalating nuclear arms race. Now, this nuclear energy agreement is also deepening worries here in Israel, which is a major American ally that Trump and, therefore, the U.S., are increasingly divergent from Israel. Ehud Barak, a former prime minister of Israel, told the army, run radio station this. He says it's a sign of the loss of trust between Netanyahu and Trump. The implication being that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is somehow messed up Israel's relationship with Trump.

Okay. Now, one more thing, Emily, considering that you're nearby, Iran, what's happening there? U.S. Central Command said it began strikes on Iranian military and logistics sites for what has been almost two weeks running now. Iran says it targeted three U.S. bases in Kuwait plus American military infrastructure in Jordan and Qatar. And President Trump is now saying he's aware of reports that Iran moved uranium enrichment centrifuges deep under a mountain, which he is warning the U.S. might hit soon. All right. That's NPR's Emily Fang. Emily, thank you very much. Thank you, A. President Trump is once again ramping up aggression toward Iran, threatening to bomb Iranian

bridges and power plans, including ones near the capital city to Iran. And he's rejecting the idea of making another deal with Iran. Trump is selling the war as a success. He was in Marietta, Georgia yesterday. Venezuela, Iran, America is back. It's stronger than ever before. And I'm telling you, it's only going one way. It's going up.

But support for Trump's actions abroad is going down even among his own supporters. NPR's Deepa Shibaram joins us now. So let's start with a new polling out from Politico. that shows President Trump's own base is getting tired of the war. Yeah, I mean, these polling numbers from July show some bad news for the president. The poll asked Trump's MAGA base, whether the U.S. should continue the war, even if it increases costs. And just 37% said yes. And that number is down from two months before when the base was split on this 50-50.

So there's a pretty significant decline here among the supporters who keep in mind back Trump staunchly. And of course, this is happening as costs continue to rise, right? Gas prices are going up again. Inflation is up. And at the same time that Americans are struggling with these higher prices, Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth said this week that the Iran war so far has cost $37.5 billion, that's with a B, which is pretty big for a price tag for a war that Trump said would end months ago. And, you know, not to mention American troops who have been killed and injured in action as well.

How is the president addressing economic issues? Yeah, so Trump in his speech yesterday made one argument that I thought was kind of interesting, A, he was trying to set up almost a side-by-side comparison of the U.S.'s operations in Venezuela to Iran. So after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicholas Maduro earlier this year, the U.S. started to control Venezuelan oil exports, and the Trump administration says that the U.S. is benefiting from this economically, though I will say there isn't much transparency around that. So Trump is saying that operations in Venezuela basically have paid for themselves. And he's sort of trying to convince Americans that Iran will be something like that,

that it'll be worth it in the end. At the same time, though, he's also continuing to mock the idea that affordability is important. He's saying that he just inherited inflation and a bad economy from former President Biden. At the same time, he also did kind of ask for a bit of patience from voters and some time to try to lower costs. Oil will be coming, it's going to be tumbling down. It was three weeks ago. They thought we had a deal. I said, I don't like we have a deal with these guys.

They break every deal they make. But I said, you know, but people thought the geniuses on Wall Street, they came down, really down, and goes back up a little bit. But it's going to come down maybe lower than when we even started, but just give me a little time. Yeah, and that's something that President Trump has been asking Americans to give them time for a while now. Yeah. His party, though, is starting to run out of time before the midterm. so as the president factoring that in at all? You know, it seems like no.

Earlier this week, the president himself said that the midterm elections weren't a part of his decision-making process on Iran, and it's putting members of his own party in a complicated position when addressing the president's economic agenda. And it's not just with Iran. For example, Trump has recently announced more tariffs on Canada, and that's left Republicans in states like Maine trying to distance themselves from the president's plans.

All right, that's NPR's Deepa. Shiveram Diba, thank you very much. Thank you. The House is on its way out the door for a month-long break right after sending a few big pieces of legislation to the Senate, including some President Trump's priorities. The Senate is in Washington for one more week. And even though both chambers are controlled by Republicans, they've been struggling to coordinate recently. NPR congressional reporter Eric McDaniel is in the studio to tell us more about this. So Eric, House Republicans just passed up a bunch of things as they prepared to go home. What did they take up? Yeah, it's been a week. There were a handful of things. One, $1,100 billion for the Pentagon, a lot of money, two in extension of government funding through the midterms to December 4th, hopefully avoiding another shutdown. There were, of course, two record shutdown so far this congressional term and three new congressional stock trading rules tied also to an unrelated voter ID measure. All right. So that's what the House did. When is the Senate going to vote on all of that?

I guess the short answer is they're not really going to take up these things as written. They'll all need to be rewritten before they can pass the Senate. So because of a procedural quirk known as the filibuster, legislation in the Senate requires 60 votes to pass the chamber. That means democratic support is needed to. So as Trump escalates the war in Iran, all without congressional authorization, as more American troops die and things keep getting more expensive at home, Democrats oppose that annual Pentagon budget, this $1.1 trillion that's usually bipartisan. For the government funding extension, Democrats want to see concessions on the president's

immigration enforcement operations like they have before. On stock trading, Democrats say it isn't enough just to prohibit lawmakers from buying new stocks, which this bill does. In fact, lawmakers should be forced to divest holdings they have when they're elected. They say that this bill has a loophole big enough to fly a Qatari jet through. Many Democrats also oppose the voter ID rules. But House Republicans also A passed a fourth thing this week, a budget framework, which is, in theory, a set up for an eventual reconciliation bill in a few months. That would contain more money for the president's war in Iran, for farmers, for his election overhaul bill.

And it's actually exempt from that 60-boat threshold. Republicans don't need Democrats at all to pass that. But Senate Majority Leader John Thune says he's holding off on passing it anyway. Okay, why? Well, Thune wants a government funding backup plan if he can't strike a deal with Senate Democrats on keeping the government open passed the midterm elections. And so he might decide that he wants to transform this party line reconciliation framework already passed by the House into a government funding bill. Not to mention the bill has Trump's election overhaul wish list tacked on, the Save America Act, which among other things

would ban mail-in voting across the country and require proof of citizenship before you can register to vote. I should say that probably doesn't qualify under the rules to pass with just a simple majority and has already failed in the Senate several times. So this is something I don't understand, because Republicans control both chambers, the House and the Senate. So why aren't they on the same page when it comes to passing these bills? Yeah, they might be in the same building, but they're also kind of in totally different worlds. Speaker Mike Johnson has percentage-wise a considerably smaller margin for error, maybe just a two-vote majority at any given time, depending on absences.

He's got a large, hard right flank to deal with and a closer relationship than John Thune with President Trump. Senate leader John Thune has to keep more Democrats on board for legislation and deal with generally more free agent, free-spirited set of legislators, the kind that become U.S. senators. So they're juggling a pretty different set of circumstances as they try and keep the plates spinning. So does that mean none of the bills become law? I guess not anytime soon. The Senate will at least consider some of this before they leave town for recess next week, make their changes, and send whatever they can pass back to the House.

Speaker Mike Johnson, for his part, will see if his members can stomach those changes after the long August recess. and they'll try you get in the fall when you have me back. All right, perfect. Make it a date. That's NPR congressional reporter. Eric McDaniel. Eric, thanks. Thank you. And that's up first for Thursday, July 23rd.

And I'm Michelle Martin. Today's episode of Up First was edited by Tina Kriah, Rebecca Metzler, Jason Breslo, Mohammed Elvadesi, and Adriana Gallardo. It was produced by Zeyag Butch and Nia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Nisha Highland, Our technical director of Stacey Abbott and our deputy executive producers, Kelly Dickens. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow.