WSJ What’s News - Trump Says U.S. Strikes in Nigeria Were to Protect Christians

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

P.M. Edition for Dec. 26. President Trump says the U.S. launched strikes on Islamic State targets in Nigeria to protect Christians–but Nigeria disagrees, saying the strikes weren’t aimed at protecting any particular religious group. We hear from WSJ reporter Alexandra Wexler about how Nigeria is approaching the issue. Plus, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he’ll meet with President Trump in Florida over the weekend for talks on the plan to end the war with Russia. And WSJ national politics reporter Sabrina Siddiqui discusses changes to health policy under the Trump administration and how the “Make America Healthy Again” movement could affect next year’s midterms. Alex Ossola hosts. Programming note: What’s News is publishing once a day through Jan. 2.Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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President Trump says the U.S. launch strikes on Islamic State targets in Nigeria to protect Christians. Plus, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he's meeting with Trump in Florida over the weekend. And what the Make America Healthy Again movement could mean for next year's midterms. They're saying you need to demonstrate that you're going to deliver after the midterms, and you need to engage Maha in order to win as a Republican in today's political. era. It's Friday, December 26th. I'm Alex Osala for the Wall Street Journal. We're on a holiday schedule in your feed once a day, and this is what's news, the top headlines and business stories moving the world today. President Trump has announced that the U.S. launch strikes on Islamic

state targets in Nigeria on Christmas Day to protect the country's Christian population from the terrorist group. Posting on social media, Trump wrote that he had warned the group to stop killing Christians, saying, quote, there would be hell to pay, and tonight there was. Trump's post didn't say how many people were killed. Nigeria's population of 237 million people is roughly split between Muslims and Christians, and the violence against Christians has escalated in northern Nigeria during the past decade. The Trump administration says Islamist groups are targeting Christians, but the Nigerian government doesn't agree.

Here's journal reporter Alexandra Wexler in Johannesburg. The Nigerians and the Americans have had some differences. framing this issue. The Nigerians have been saying these Islamist groups are a big problem, but they target indiscriminately. They kill and kidnap Muslims as well as Christians. A defense department official said Nigeria's government approved the Christmas Day strikes and worked with the U.S. to carry them out. Nigerian authorities today said that they aided the U.S. strikes, but were adamant that the effort wasn't aimed at protecting any particular religious group. Alexandra says that the cooperation comes after President Trump last month threatened military

action in Nigeria if the government didn't do more to protect Christians. And since then, the Nigerian government has made quite a big effort to engage with U.S. officials on what is going on in Nigeria and how the U.S. could potentially help fight some of these groups, Islamist, terrorists, and armed gangs that aren't necessarily affiliated with a religious group. And the Nigerian government has said repeatedly that it had worked with the U.S. provided intelligence to the U.S. who then launched the actual military intervention. They discussed this attack with the U.S. government ahead of it actually happening. They're being very careful to show that they were involved in this

and that this is not the U.S. going over their heads and attacking on Nigerian soil without the knowledge of the government. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said today that he would meet with President Trump in Florida on Sunday for talks on the plan to end the war with Russia. Zelensky said they would discuss security guarantees for Kyiv and an economic agreement. In Asia, the Chinese government has imposed sanctions on 20 U.S. defense companies and 10 of their executives after the Trump administration last week approved $11 billion in weapon sales to Taiwan. China's targets include Northrop Grumman, Boeing's defense unit that's based in

St. Louis and Palmer Lucky, the founder of Andral Industries. Beijing's freezing assets and issuing bans on transactions with China. It's also prohibiting the sanctioned executives from going to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. The move emphasizes Beijing's claim over Taiwan, but is largely symbolic because U.S. defense contractors generally do little business in China. The U.S. has sold arms to Taiwan for years.

China said today that the U.S. weapons approval interferes with its internal affairs and undermines its sovereignty and territorial integrity. And former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for money laundering and abuse of power in connection with the looting of the OneMDB's sovereign wealth fund. OneMDB is one of the largest financial crimes of the century and dates back to 2009. More than $4.5 billion was allegedly taken from the fund,

with money used to buy art and put toward the Hollywood film The Wolf of Wall Street. The fallout has continued more than a decade later, with J.P. Morgan agreeing in August to pay $330 million to settle claims that it facilitated transactions. Joe Lowe, a financier alleged to have masterminded the scheme, remains at large. Today, the Malaysian court rejected the argument from Najeev's defense that the money Najeev handled was sent from Saudi Arabia's royal family, not from the sovereign wealth fund. He's in prison for an earlier conviction related to the one MDB scandal, and his legal team said it would appeal this decision.

Stock trading was thin the day after Christmas, and major U.S. indexes were mostly flat in midday trading. In commodities, silver and gold futures hit their latest records. Both tend to gain as safe havens when investors are worried about inflation. Coming up, what was on the Maha agenda this year, and what does it mean for the year ahead? That's after the break. As companies seek to close growing gaps in skills and talent, Deloitte U.S. CEO Jason Garzadas believes it's important for organizations to understand their baseline of skills. There's so many organizations that can't ask and answer the fundamental questions about how much computer science or data management skills do I have or AI development skills in a given domain.

By performing a skills inventory, leaders can truly understand where their efforts should be focused. Being blind to those gaps is the real miss. Visit Deloitte.com to learn how your enterprise can help successfully cultivate talent. We're taking a look at health policy during President Trump's second term, like the changes to vaccine policy under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And how Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement could affect Republican prospects in next year's midterm election. I'm joined now by WSJ National Politics reporter Sabrina Siddiqui. Sabrina, would have been some of the biggest health care changes under the Trump administration?

One of the biggest changes came early on when President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that really slashed funding for Medicaid by over $1 trillion, fewer people will be covered by Medicaid over the next decade because of that law. In the public health domain, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy has brought about significant changes to vaccine policy. and also the makeup of who is making decisions around what policy should look like. What has been Kennedy's approach to vaccine policy and how have we been seeing that play out? He is a longtime vaccine skeptic. So what we knew is that he was going to fundamentally try and reshape U.S. vaccine policy. Under Kennedy's watch, COVID vaccines are not universally recommended any more. more, they also drop the recommendation that newborns receive hepatitis B vaccine at birth.

And then, of course, they've tried to cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. So changing the CDC webpage to say that vaccines might cause autism, firing the director of the CDC because she did not want to sign off on some of his proposed changes to vaccines, and then firing all of the members of a key vaccine advisory panel and replacing. that panel with Kennedy's own hand-picked advisors, many of whom are vaccine skeptics, and now they're going to be examining the childhood vaccine schedule more broadly. When the CDC changes its recommendations for vaccines, does that mean that people actually lose access, like health insurers won't cover it anymore?

When the CDC makes a change to vaccine recommendations, it does not necessarily mean that those vaccines are no longer available, but it does change. change what some of the insurance coverage might look like, especially when it comes to federal programs. Shifting slightly from vaccines, one of the more controversial points that was made by the Trump administration was saying that there's a connection between taking Tylenol during pregnancy and autism in the child that's born later. Can we expect this kind of focus on other types of medications in the year ahead? You had President Trump saying quite definitively that pregnant women shouldn't take Tylenol. And while there are some studies that have shown a potential

link between acetaminophen and autism, other studies have found no link, even where there are some studies that have shown a potential link, those studies have not said that the Tylenol has caused autism. So the big concern that emanated from that moment and that could give us a sense of what's to come is that this administration is not relying on what the abundance of evidence shows. The bigger concern that we've been hearing from physicians and public health experts is they're just planting these seeds of doubt. I interviewed many pregnant women who said they were thinking twice about whether or not they should take tall and all. I think the way the Trump administration sees it is that for too long, there has not been a willingness to challenge

public health agencies and that Americans have just been told to take what they say as sacrosanct and that they're just asking questions. They're just reviewing guidelines. They're just looking at the role of the pharmaceutical industry and where they may be conflicts of interest. How might Kennedy's approach and his supporters and critics play into the elections next year? There's no question that people who identify as Maha supporters, right?

Supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement. They see themselves as critical to Republican success in the midterm elections. Once Kennedy ran as an independent, he brought together this coalition of people. They were not hard-line Democrats or hard-line Republicans. A lot of them are often disaffected voters who feel like they don't have a home, who believed so strongly in what he was saying about not just public health, but about nutrition and the need to crack down on ultra-processed food. And some of that is actually much more popular than his actions on vaccines.

So, you know, there are some areas in which they feel like he hasn't delivered on the agenda. They're saying you need to make concrete promises. You need to demonstrate that you're going to deliver. So if you're not running on policies that fit within the Maha agenda, they're not necessarily going to come out and vote just because there's a Republican on the ticket. That was WSJ National Politics reporter Sabrina Siddiqui. Thanks so much, Sabrina. Thank you. And finally, have your gifts from overseas been delayed? If you haven't gotten them yet, they may have also been destroyed. In recent months, tens of thousands of of imports have been blocked from entering the U.S. and stacked in enormous warehouses.

Many do get to their destinations after buyers complete government paperwork, but some that can't clear customs because of missing or incomplete information are returned or smashed to bits. The stranded parcels are casualties of shifting U.S. tariffs and tougher customs enforcement and import restrictions. And that's what's news for this week. Heads up that What's News and Markets and What's News Sunday are on hiatus this weekend for the holidays, and we'll be publishing just one show a day through January 2nd. We'll be back Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Daniel Bach and Julie Chang

with supervising producer Tali Arbell. Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Jessica Fenton is our technical manager. Aisha El-Muslim is our development producer. Chris Zinsley is our deputy editor. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. I'm Alex Oscella. Thanks for listening.

Thank you.