Top 5 US news stories
September 22 2025
GOP Leaders Frame Kirk Memorial as 'Revival' to Unify Movement
Republican Optimism on Nation's Direction Plummets After Kirk Assassination, Poll Finds
Marriage Rates Fall as More Americans Delay Vows Until Financially Secure
Trump Expected to Approve TikTok Deal Including Oracle, Silver Lake, Murdoch, Dell
Mead: A Week of Global Crises Signals an 'Accelerating Dissolution' of the Post-WW2 Order
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1. GOP Leaders Frame Kirk Memorial as 'Revival' to Unify Movement
Charlie Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday stretched five hours, reflecting how President Trump, top members of his administration and many other Republican leaders appeared hopeful it might unify and fortify a conservative movement that had shown signs of cracking less than a year after they swept back into power. “This is like an old time revival, isn’t it?” Trump said, speaking before tens of thousands of people at the ceremony. He was just one of several speakers to use the word “revival.” Before Kirk was assassinated on Sept. 10, Trump’s grip on the conservative movement was straining. Elon Musk had departed the White House several months ago after a messy and public falling out with Trump. Republicans splintered over how far to push an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. And Trump’s foreign policy was pulling the party in two directions, with one faction hopeful for more aggressive interventions and others insisting that the White House should disentangle the U.S. from problems thousands of miles away. But all those differences appeared to fall away on Sunday, when speaker after speaker invoked Kirk’s legacy of inspiring younger Americans to believe in the conservative cause. Musk at one point sat down beside Trump at the Glendale, Ariz., stadium and shook the U.S. president’s hand, symbolic of a new unity Republicans are hoping to harness as they face historic headwinds in next year’s midterm elections. Some speakers at the event focused more on Kirk’s Christian faith, while others noted the incredible political operation he inspired. The revival theme cut across many of these speeches as GOP leaders tried to envision the path ahead. Turning Point helped drive voter turnout in the 2024 election, and the organization could prove crucial to the Republican Party’s success in 2026 and beyond.
WSJ
2. Republican Optimism on Nation's Direction Plummets After Kirk Assassination, Poll Finds
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republicans’ outlook on the direction of the country has soured dramatically, according to a new AP-NORC poll that was conducted shortly after last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The share of Republicans who see the country headed in the right direction has fallen sharply in recent months, according to the September survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Today, only about half in the GOP see the nation on the right course, down from 70% in June. The shift is even more glaring among Republican women and the party’s under-45 crowd. Overall, about one-quarter of Americans say things in the country are headed in the right direction, down from about 4 in 10 in June. Democrats and independents didn’t shift meaningfully.
AP News
3. Marriage Rates Fall as More Americans Delay Vows Until Financially Secure
The estimated median age for a first marriage as of last year was 30 for men and 29 for women, according to the most recent census data, up from 28 for men and 26 for women in 2008. The recent engagement of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, both in their mid-30s and perhaps at the apex of their careers, is the ultimate capstone model. The problem, researchers say, is that a capstone view of marriage raises the bar for what people think their lives need to look like before they wed. “If the white picket-fence home and the beautiful wedding in the Virginia countryside is out of reach for you,” Wilcox said, “then you are just never going to get married, because you think ‘marriage isn’t for me.’ ” Still, researchers say, people waiting longer to get married and being more selective about whom they pair off with can result in more stable marriages, contributing to a reduction in the divorce rate. The marriage rate, that is the rate of new marriages to the overall population, has been on a long downward trajectory, census data shows. Between 2008 and 2023, the first-marriage rate among 22- to 45-year-olds declined 9%, to 60 marriages per 1,000 never-married Americans, according to an analysis by Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Marriage & Family Research.
WSJ
4. Trump Expected to Approve TikTok Deal Including Oracle, Silver Lake, Murdoch, Dell
After months of negotiations between the Trump administration and China over the U.S. operations of the popular short-form video app, the two sides have a preliminary deal. Under the agreement, existing investors and a group of new U.S. backers that includes private-equity firm Silver Lake and cloud-computing firm Oracle would together own about 80% of the company. A new version of TikTok’s content-recommendation algorithm would be retrained and, crucially, users would be able to access the service via the same app they have been using. President Trump is expected to approve the framework via an executive order declaring that it satisfies the requirements of the law later this week, according to a senior White House official. Under the agreement, a new entity would be created to run TikTok in the U.S. A consortium of new investors including private-equity firm Silver Lake and Oracle would own roughly half. Existing investors such as trading firm Susquehanna International would hold about 30%. TikTok parent ByteDance’s stake would dip below 20% to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal or stop operating in the U.S. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday morning, Trump said Michael Dell is “involved” in the deal, and that Lachlan Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch will also “probably be in the group.” Lachlan Murdoch is chair of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, and is also executive chair and chief executive of Fox News parent Fox Corp. A person familiar with the matter said any investment in TikTok would come from Fox Corp.
WSJ
5. Mead: A Week of Global Crises Signals an 'Accelerating Dissolution' of the Post-WW2 Order
A line widely but wrongly attributed to Lenin states that there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen. Last week was one of those weeks. Israel struck Hamas negotiators in Qatar and, despite an intensifying global outcry, moved toward a full-scale invasion and occupation of Gaza City. Amid a wave of cyberattacks and sabotage against European countries, a large group of Russian drones invaded the airspace of Poland, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member. President Trump demanded that NATO allies slap massive secondary sanctions on India and China as the first step in a renewed campaign to force Russia to end its attack on Ukraine. The French government fell after losing a confidence vote in the National Assembly, and the prime minister of Japan announced he was stepping down after a disastrous tenure during which the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party of Japan lost its majorities in both houses of Parliament. “Far right” parties continued their advances across Europe. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly the National Front) and Alice Weidel’s Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, all lead national polls. The AfD tripled its vote in the prosperous former West German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, while the streets of London filled with antiestablishment and pro-Trump demonstrators. Only the intervention of South Korea’s foreign minister prevented some 316 Hyundai workers from being handcuffed on the long deportation flight from Atlanta to Seoul. Brazil’s former president was sentenced to 27 years in prison after being convicted of plotting a coup. Britain’s ambassador to the U.S. was dismissed after the publication of embarrassing emails he sent to his former friend Jeffrey Epstein. And the assassination of Charlie Kirk sharpened questions at home and abroad about the social and political stability of the U.S., the country on which what remains of world order depends more than ever. Any one of these events would dominate a week’s news in calmer times. What we are seeing today is the accelerating dissolution of the post-1945 world order. It isn’t merely that the old order’s foreign opponents have combined more effectively to disrupt it. The order’s defenders are flailing.
WSJ, Walter Russell Mead
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