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Hey there, it's shemitha. I've got a quick request for you. If Apple News Today is an essential part of your morning routine, follow the show in Apple Podcasts. And if you have another 30 seconds, leave us a rating and a review, too. It helps other people find our show and it helps us know what you like about it. Thanks. Good morning. It's Monday, September 15th. I'm Shemitah Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, how Charlie Kirk represents the modern gop, the new policy that's left transgender veterans feeling betrayed, and takeaways from Pope Leo's first interview. But first, to the economy. It's a crucial week for the Federal Reserve as the central bank grapples with a slowing job market, inflation and an overall uncertain economic outlook. At its policy meeting this week, the Fed is expected to cut the nation's benchmark interest rate after holding steady for the past nine months.
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They're likely to do so even though inflation has stopped declining and in fact looks a little bit worse than it did a few months ago.
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Nick Timoros is the chief economics correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.
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They had been reluctant to do it when the economy looked a little bit more solid, when the labor market was perhaps in better shape because inflation seems to be going in the wrong way.
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Those factors have put the Fed in a precarious position. If the central bank moves too quickly in one direction, it runs the risk of overcorrection, creating more problems down the line.
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It's a little bit like a soccer goalie who has a penalty kick they have to defend against. Are you going to jump to the left to defend against weakness in the labor market, or are you going to jump to the right to defend against higher inflation? And when you move in one direction, you sort of open yourself up to a worse outcome.
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As the Fed deals with all of this, there is still much uncertainty over Trump's attempts to exert more control over the Federal Reserve. A judge ruled that for now, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook can remain in her job after Trump had announced he was dismissing Cook over allegations that she committed mortgage fraud by listing a secondary home as her primary residence to get a lower interest rate. That that means that Cook is set to attend this week's interest rate meeting. The government has appealed the ruling, and a decision could come as soon as today. Timoros reviewed documents tied to the property in question, which is a condo in Atlanta.
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The documents that we reviewed have shown for the first time that her lender may have known that the purchase of the Atlanta condo was a vacation home. They don't prove this. They're not exculpatory. But they show that when she sought a loan estimate for that mortgage, she filled out the property use as a vacation home.
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That complicates the narrative Trump and the DOJ have laid out against Cook. So far, no charges have been filed. Meanwhile, the Senate is also rushing to confirm Stephen Myron, Trump's pick to fill a vacant Fed governor seat. Myron, who currently has a role in the White House as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, has agreed to an unprecedented arrangement that'll allow him to temporarily step away from that job and serve as a fed governor until January 31st of next year when the term expires.
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It's very unusual because normally the Fed has tried to maintain a little bit of distance from the executive branch and so having somebody who is still technically employed by Donald Trump, who sits on the Fed's seven member Board of Governors, is not something we've seen in the 90 years since the modern Fed governance was established.
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Timoros also notes that Myron himself has in the past been critical of Fed officials who have worked for the central bank and the White House. He wrote in a paper last year that anyone who worked at the Fed should be banned from serving in the executive branch for four years. The Senate is likely to confirm Myron today. Foreign let's turn to the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's shooting yesterday. Utah Governor Spencer Cox said that the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was not cooperating with authorities and they were expecting to formally file charges tomorrow. Over the weekend, Kirk's widow, Erica, spoke publicly for the first time. She addressed, quote, evildoers issuing stern warning.
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You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.
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She also talked about how she was at a loss to explain the news to their 1 year old son and 3 year old daughter. A memorial is being planned for next weekend at State Farm Stadium in Arizona, and politicians gathered at the Kennedy center in Washington last night for a vigil. Kirk's influence on national politics and the evolution in his own politics since starting Turning Point USA in 2012 is a reflection of how the modern Republican Party has changed over the past 15 years or so. So let's take a few minutes today to talk about Kirk's impact. Last year. Atlantic staff writer Ali Breland profiled Kirk. We caught up with him after the shooting to talk about Kirk's role as a linkage between various factions of the.
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Republican Party he is very respected in the establishment world of the conservative party. He occupied this extremely unique role as this kind of connector and bridge between all of these different things, breland told.
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Us at the start of Kirk's political rise. From his late teenage years to early twenties, he focused on Reagan era conservative touchstones like free markets and limited government. Here's Kirk speaking at the Western Conservative summit in 2016.
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The younger generation needs to be reminded and told and quite frankly educated that free markets and free people are a necessary precedent to people's lives getting better.
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After Trump won the Republican nomination that year, Kirk campaigned for him, but mentioned at the time that he wasn't the biggest fan. Trump's election to the White House in 2016 began to change the relationship that Kirk had with the president and his family, and also the influence that Kirk would have on the direction of the Republican Party overall. Kirk had started Turning Point USA with the goal of modernizing campus Republican activism. As Will Sommer in the right leaning outlet the Bulwark wrote last week, Kirk's vision was wildly different from the stodgy, nerdy, buttoned up loafers and slacks contrarians that had defined college Republicanism for generations. Instead, he writes, both Kirk and the Trumps reveled in a more confrontational, at times dehumanizing political discourse. Like the GOP at large, Kirk came a long way from Reagan's version of the Republican Party last year. He increasingly spoke of the election as being a fight against invading armed hordes and that if Trump lost the election, Haitian migrants would, quote, become your masters. Kirk called the Civil Rights act of 1964amistake and said it had become an anti white weapon, leading to what he called a DEI bureaucracy. Breland wrote that some of Kirk's shifts could be seen as reading the political winds of a party influenced by and enamored with Trump. As his access and relationships grew, Kirk began to function as not only a social media influencer but also as a political operator, using his audience and his connections to become a powerful force in party politics.
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The thing that doesn't get clipped and put on TikTok is like in between him debating different people or at the beginning of his events he would also have someone running around the clipboard. He'd be registering voters. At the same time he would like talk about getting low propensity voters like the ones that were showing up to his events out to vote because he thought that that was going to be a key demographic that would show up for Trump.
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And Kirk's growing influence, Breland says, mirrored the power a new wave of online commentators now have in the modern gop.
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There is this entire constellation of these very influential with large audience podcasters and streamers that have a voice that then also go into effect policy. And I think that the evidence of this is the am of people that exist within the administration that directly came out of these kinds of podcasts. But like compared to other people, he did have a way to talk to younger people that other people did not in the party.
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Let's turn now to the military, where the Trump administration is using a policy from its first term to support efforts to now remove transgender people from service. You might remember on his first day in office this year, President Trump signed an executive order banning transgender troops, which was initially blocked by lower courts, but the conservative members of the Supreme Court later voted to allow it. Now, with the goal of eliminating trans people from the military by December 1, the Defense Department is combing through military medical records to look for people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. And a policy from eight years ago, when Trump was last in office is actually the reason many trans service members have this diagnosis on their records in the first place. NPR's Lauren Hodges told us about it.
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During the first Trump administration, anybody who was trans in the military were told they had a deadline to go get this official military medical diagnosis for gender dysphoria, and that's how they could stay and continue serving and keep their jobs. So a lot of people went to go do it, but and not only did it feel a little strange to some of them because they didn't feel like it reflected who they were, they were also nervous about the military and the government having that kind of data.
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On them, including Logan Ireland, a master sergeant in the Air Force.
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He wanted to keep doing his job, so he went and got this taken care of and put on file. And now he is being removed from service for having gender dysphoria on file. So he is now really frustrated. He feels betrayed.
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And now Hodges says these diagnoses are being used to circumvent the typical military removal process.
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You're supposed to have the due process as a service member to go before one of these separation boards and plead your case to stay in the service. But the Air Force decided ahead of time, if this person has gender dysphoria, you will find them unfit to serve and separate them, which has never been done before.
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The Air Force also says it plans to deny early retirement benefits for transgender troops and that it'll try to revoke benefits for people who already qualified that's leaving trans service members with two agree to a voluntary separation where they receive a lower lump sum payment typically offered to junior troops. Or if they try and fight the ban, their separation will be classified as involuntary and they'd get nothing. The director of Veterans Legal Support Network told NPR that kicking trans people out of the military and denying them benefits not only sets a bad precedent, but also hurts the Pentagon's goal of military readiness.
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Some of these people are rocket scientists. They have combat training and experience. They are, in the case of LOGAN Ireland has 15 years in special investigations. You know, this is all stuff that is very useful to the military.
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Ireland told NPR that he feels like his service has been totally disregarded.
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You know, we're service members first. We all raise our right hand. We wear the same uniform. The only difference is we just happen to be transgender. And my heart just breaks. It breaks because I gave so much of my life to the service. It's a core part of who I am.
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He's now trying to figure out a plan for his future outside of the military without the retirement pay that his family was banking on. The Air Force did not respond to NPR's request for comment. Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Israel for discussions with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the war in Gaza. Before arriving, he said he would talk about the ongoing conflict and seek answers about Israel's attack in Qatar that targeted Hamas leadership. That attack disrupted efforts to broker a ceasefire and reportedly angered President Trump, the AP notes. Rupio's visit is also a signal of support for Israel, which has become increasingly isolated as the UN prepares to debate the creation of a Palestinian state this week. Meanwhile, in Gaza City, Israeli forces destroyed 30 residential buildings, forcing thousands to leave their homes. This is the latest in Israel's plan to seize and occupy Gaza City, which has drawn international criticism. Pope Leo discussed the challenges of learning on the job as he stepped into the papacy in his first interview since becoming pontiff. The interview excerpts are connected to an upcoming biography on the new pope and were released on Catholic news site Crux. He also spoke on the issue of the widening income gap between the working class and executive class, citing Tesla's plan to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. Leo said, quote, if that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we're in big trouble. He also commented on broader world affairs, saying the UN appeared to have lost its ability to bring countries together and mediate. The comments were released on Sunday, which was Leo's 70th birthday. And finally, what's six feet long, has white eyes and big fins and is molten gold in color, apparently a very peculiar type of nurse shark. Fishermen casting lines off the coast of Costa Rica were shocked to discover this cartoon like shark. At first, many doubted the pictures they took were genuine, but scientists have published a paper determining the sighting as real and believe a combination of rare genetic conditions are to blame. As one scientist told Nat Geo, the ocean can still surprise us. You can check out the pictures for yourself. They are pretty cool to see, along with all the other stories we talked about today in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around for the latest episode of Apple News in Conversation. And I talked to New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv, who recently came out with a piece about a woman who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived with psychosis for decades, but all of a sudden, after starting medication for cancer, her symptoms of psychosis disappeared. It's a story that shows why psychiatry's understanding of schizophrenia may be shifting. If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News in Conversation to find that episode. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.