Up First from NPR - U.S. Preparing for Winter Storm; Trump's Use of Military; U.S Consumer Spending

Episode Date: January 24, 2026

At least half of the U.S. population will be hit by a powerful winter storm this weekend - we'll tell you how Oklahoma, and other states, are preparing. Plus, a look at how President Trump is using the military overseas as well inside the U.S. during his second term. Plus, a look at consumer spending in the U.S. and how sustainable it is at present levels. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Millions across the U.S., race for a major winter storm. At least 16 states have declared emergencies ahead of lots of snow, ice, and perilously low temperatures. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is up first from NPR News. The risks are so intense that as I'm standing here right now, I'm declaring a state of emergency throughout the entire state of new hospital. Governor Kathy Hokel, one of the many governors worried about the dangerous conditions that are forecast. We'll have more on that. We'll also look at how President Trump is using the military overseas and right here at home. Also, consumer spending carries the economy, but is that sustainable?

So stay with us. We have the news you need to start your weekend. Over 200 million Americans are in for a weekend of tough weather. It's over half the entire population of the United States. A powerful winter storm is expected to hit large parts of the country from New Mexico all the way to the northeast. And Pierce, Frank Morris, is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where like many other cities, people are preparing to be snowed in. Thanks for being with us, Frank. You bet, Scott. And storm's already, it's just getting started, but it's already having an enormous effect, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. The storm is mostly shutting down a huge swath of the nation this weekend, Even though it's only Saturday school districts from El Paso, Texas to Philadelphia, some 2,000 miles away of already canceled classes into next week.

Roads, of course, are going to be slick for days. The storm has already knocked tens of thousands of homes and businesses off the power grid, mainly in Texas. It's expected to trigger widespread outages from central Texas, fanning out through the Carolinas and into Virginia. And some of those blackouts could last a week or more. And the storm threatens to drop more than a foot of snow from Oklahoma City to New York City. And there's the bitter cold. We're expecting lows in the single digits through Monday in Tulsa. Where you are, what are people doing there to prepare?

You know, they're doing pretty much the same as like 200 million other people facing bad roads and power outages this weekend. They're stocking up on supplies. At Oasis Fresh Market, a grocery store in North Tulsa, Chavonda Pennell, Jacob Washburn, and Ty Walker, their shopping cards. Let's take a listen. I've already been out to the store once, but I went, came back and got some more meats, some more meats, water, toiletries, just all the necessities. I'm only hoping two days. Yep, stocking up. Walmart, we had an online order, and they canceled it on us.

Ordered it two days ago, and they canceled it, so here I. I got potatoes, and I got some beans, and they're going to stick to you. Despite the cold and hassle, lots of people here say they're looking forward to being hunkered down with their families for a while. Well, cozy as that sounds, it's also a dangerous situation too, isn't it, what people face? Right. You know, it's got ice is the main concern. It's building up on power lines right now. And eventually they snap, or trees take them down. And when they go, the power goes with them. Widespread outages are expected to fan out over nearly 2,000 miles. And power crews will take days, if not weeks, to restore electricity. And without electricity, many people's furnaces won't work.

Fumes from generators kill people in every big winter storm. Emergency officials say cautioned not to use a generator indoors or in the garage when it's outside, make sure it's not near any windows. Inside, space heaters and candles can spark fires. What about roads? Ah, boy, the roads are going to be dangerous for days. Across many states, the roads are being pre-treated, but this much snow and ice is going to make many in pass. the operations manager for the Public Works Department here in Tulsa told me that the last time there was a snowstorm this bad 15 years ago, it took two weeks to get all the streets clear. Another storm people remember here in Ice Storm in 2007 cut power to North Tulsa for a week.

One woman here told me she's never seen Tulsa look so bad. Yeah, well, the best message is people stay off the streets. NPR's Frank Morris in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thanks so much for speaking with us today. You bet, Scott. Thank you. Trump has taken military action against Greenland off the table. That's what he said during his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week,

where he also said there's a framework for a deal for both Greenland as well as the Arctic region. There were few details on that framework, but on his way back to the U.S., the president-tled reporters he had sent what he called an armada of naval forces toward Iran. This is in case President Trump decides to take action against Iran, where the government recently responded to weeks of protests with violence. He's also weighing a military deployment right here in the U.S. in Minneapolis. During his first term, President Trump faced some resistance from the U.S. military. But look at how things are going during his second term with NPR's Tom Bowman and Quill Lawrence.

Good to have both of you. Good to be here. Yes, thank you. Tom, let's begin domestically. How have we seen the military deployed here at home? Well, Scott, if you left the studio and walked to the window and look down North Capitol Street here in Washington, you would likely see National Guard troops walking up and down the street. There are more than 2,000 National Guard troops here in D.C.

right now, and they've been extended all through 2026. And also, Guard troops have gone to Memphis, New Orleans. Trump tried to send out-of-state guard troops to Oregon and Illinois. Federal judges said that's not a good idea. There's no need for that. Now we have active duty forces, Scott, on standby from Colorado, from Alaska, and from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, more than 2,000 of them in total on pre-deployment orders to go to Minneapolis, if need be. And let's turn to you both, because given the president's comments, military action against Iran remains possible. U.S. is still boarding oil tankers off of Venezuela, where, of course, just three weeks ago,

U.S. forces seized President Maduro. What do you see as being different in terms of the U.S. military being deployed in the second term from the Trump first term, Tom? Well, you're right, Scott. Venezuela, they seized President Maduro that was a Delta force. It was a raid. It was a targeted mission to grab Maduro, get them out, and send him to New York for prosecution. There were no outside of that boots on the ground. You're not looking at a large-scale military operation like we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. and I don't think Trump wants to have that kind of open-ended military mission. Will? Yeah, it can seem like a contradiction because at the same time as the Pentagon is pushing out this message of, let's say, mess around and find out and lethality.

Trump and many of the people in his administration have talked about kind of an America first isolationism. But what's consistent is what's Tom saying is there's this aversion to any boots on the ground or any responsibility, sense of, of owning it just because you broke it to turn around the old pottery barn rule. And certainly no nation building like we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yeah, to talk about Iraq, and the U.S. this week just left its last base in central Iraq. And in Syria, it's announced pretty bluntly that it's abandoning any support for the Kurdish forces that did most of the fighting against ISIS there. But already, you see this result is that, you know, these Kurdish forces on the ground in

Northeast Syria, they were guarding thousands of ISIS prisoners. And in the fighting with the Syrian government, the Kurds have now pulled back from hundreds of those ISIS fighters escaped. So, and no boots on the ground, but also, you know, fewer allies on the ground, which means there can be consequences for that. Let me ask you both about the question of legality. I'm thinking less about Maduro or boarding the tankers and the boat strikes near Venezuela. Does this put the U.S. into unknown territory? No, there are definitely questions about that. Now, the Justice Department has said these boat strikes are legal,

and their argument is that these boats are carrying drugs to the United States that are killing tens of thousands of Americans. Therefore, we can attack these boats because they're killing Americans. There are many people in Congress and defense analysts here question that, And we do know that the former head of Southern Command, Admiral Halsey, he actually resigned over this issue. He had, I'm told, by Capitol Hill sources, reservations about these boat strikes, and he decided to resign rather than continue. Quill? I spoke with Sarah Yeager about this.

She used to work at the Department of Defense advising the Joint Chiefs on humanitarian law. She's now at Human Rights Watch. She said that Pentagon has specifically fired the staff that used to advise. the targeters and the operators. So there was a large staff that was dealing with civilian harm mitigation, meaning making sure that civilians were not harmed in U.S. operations. That has been gutted. The guardrails that kept rules of engagement from being unlawful, those have been dismantled.

And this is playing out with military leadership, too, in a recent Senate confirmation hearing for two generals to replace the heads of Southern Command, who Tom just mentioned, and the heads of cyber command. I mean, one is replacing an admiral that quite possibly left because he had objections to what he thought were illegal orders killing the people in these fastboats. The other was replacing a general that got the sack because he ran a foul of a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Laura Lumer.

So you have a Republican senator, chairman of this committee, assuring them that they should, should speak their minds and tell the senators how they really feel. But there is uncertainty as to sort of what is grounds for dismissal and what they can say and still keep their careers. And along those lines, Scott, I just had breakfast with a retired four-star officer who said, listen, his friends who are still in active duty are afraid to say anything, afraid to stand up to Secretary Hague Seth or go afoul of President Trump. They're afraid of getting fired because, as you know, many admirals and generals,

have been fired over the past year by this administration. And the consequence of that, Scott, is we used to get background briefings from military officials, senior military officials about, let's say, Venezuela, what's going on there, what's the possibilities for Iran. Those have all dried up. Last year, there were only two Pentagon briefings by Secretary Hague says. So as a result of all that, the American people aren't getting a sense of what the military is doing in their name. And here's Tom Bowman and Quill Lawrence. Thanks so much.

You're welcome. Thank you. Poll after poll shows that Americans are worried about the cost of living. And according to a new survey from the University of Michigan, they feel worse about the economy now than they did a year ago. And yet, consumer spending remains high, at least for now. We're joined now by NPR Scott Horsley. Good to have you, Scott. Good morning, good to be with you. And you have some sales receipts there. What do they show?

Yeah, they show that even during the government shutdown this past fall, when people's mood about the economy hit bottom, they didn't dial back their spending. On the contrary, spending rose pretty sharply during the fall. Economist Tim Quinlan, who's with Wells Fargo, says the number suggests that despite people's deep funk about the economy, they continued to shell out not only for necessities like food and rent, we also saw more spending on things like recreation. Growing faster than many people would have thought when there was a lot of hand-wring about the impact of tariffs and, you know, labor market is losing momentum, but one way or another, the consumer just keeps finding a way to keep spending. Now, for some families, finding away might mean dipping into savings or reaching for a credit card,

because in both October and November, spending increased faster than people's incomes did. And how long, can, if I might put it this way, we keep that up before we run out of money? Well, there are already signs some families that hit the wall. Procter & Gamble said this week that some anxious shoppers are beginning to skimp on things like laundry deterrent, and even toilet paper. Now, presumably that just means switching from P&G Charmin to a cheaper brand, but, you know, there are lots of examples of kind of two-speed spending behavior where upper-income families are able to splurge while lower-income families are just scraping by. The Darden restaurant chain, for example, has a wide variety of offerings from the never-ending

pasta bowl at Olive Garden, which is just under $14, to a $90-dollar Wagyu Filet at the Capitol Grill. And CEO Rick Cardina says Darden's doing fine thanks to middle and upper income customers who are offsetting any cutbacks by those at the bottom. The consumer is still resilient. They're being cautious with the largest growth coming from our higher income households. But there was a little pullback in those earning less than 50,000 in casual brands. Now, wealthier families might feel like they can afford to spend more because, you know, the stocks in their retirement account are doing okay and their home values are climbing,

whereas people living paycheck to paycheck may feel like they have to tighten their else. Scott, is there any help on the horizon for lower income families? There could be some. They may get a bigger tax refund this year and perhaps see a little boost in their take-home pay, thanks to the GOP tax cut past last summer, although we know most of the benefits of the tax cut are going to go to higher-income families. We talk all the time about how consumer spending is the biggest engine of the U.S. economy. Tim Quinlan notes that engine is increasingly driven by a relatively small slice of well-off shoppers. The unpleasant truth of it is the top 10% of households give you almost half of all the overall spending. So if those households are doing well, that

kind of papers over the struggles that people have at different levels of income. Carmakers, for example, have been reporting solid sales, even though it's getting harder for middle and lower-income families to afford a new car. You can have a macro economy that looks pretty good on the surface, even if a lot of families are struggling to pay their bills. I'm Bear Scott Horace. thanks so much. You're welcome. And that's up first for Saturday, January 24th, 2026. I'm Scott Simon. And I'm Aisha Roscoe. Dave Mischich produced today's podcast with help from Michael Radcliffe.

Our editor is Deep Parvaz, along with Russell Lewis, Andrew Sussman, Rafael Nomm, and Fernando Naro. Andy Craig is our director. Our technical director has been David Greenberg, with engineering support from Sovan, Zach Coleman, and Simon Laslo Johnson. Our senior supervising editor is Shannon Rhodes. Evie Stone is our executive producer. And Jim Kane is our deputy managing editor. And tomorrow on the Sunday story with Ayesha, President Trump's vision for the new American workforce leans

less on the colors educated, white-collar worker, and more on the trades. But how do women fit into that vision? We'll get into all of that. But you know, Scott, we also have so many stories to offer over the weekend and throughout the week, but definitely over the weekend when it's going to be snowing and all that stuff. So people need to tune in. All the latest news and books, movies, music, sports, and so much more.

Even every now and then like recipes and games and all that stuff. Tune into NPR. Find your local station at stations.npr.org. Yes. Tune in. So when you're bundled up in the blizzard, you be your friend. Reach your fingers out and just... Tune in.

Just tune in.