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Trump administration vows for immigration changes

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Nov. 29, 2025, 9:32 AM ESTBy Freddie ClaytonPresident Donald Trump said Saturday morning that Venezuela’s airspace should be considered “closed” as he weighs military action against the South American nation. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.There was no immediate response from Venezuela, which maintains authority over its own airspace, to the post. Flight-tracking data appeared to show a handful of planes still above the country on Saturday morning.A number of airlines began rerouting flights away from Venezuela’s airspace earlier this month, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has issued a warning of “heightened military activity” in the area.On Wednesday, Venezuela’s civil aviation authority stripped take-off and landing rights from six commercial carriers it accused of “joining the actions of state terrorism promoted by the United States government and unilaterally suspending air commercial operations.”On Thursday, Trump said the U.S. could “very soon” begin targeting alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers on land, expanding operations that have so far focused on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.Trump says land strikes in Venezuela could start “very soon”02:03In Thanksgiving remarks to U.S. troops around the world, Trump thanked the Air Force’s 7th Bomb Wing for its work to “deter Venezuelan drug traffickers” and said “it’s about 85% stopped by sea … and we’ll be starting to stop them by land.”“Also, the land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon,” the president added, speaking from his Mar-a-Lago estate.For months, the president has intensified U.S. military presence in the region, ramping up pressure on Venezuela with strikes on alleged drug boats since early September. The military has carried out nearly two dozen known strikes on vessels they said were carrying drugs, killing at least 82 people.The USS Gerald R. Ford, a major aircraft carrier, arrived in the Caribbean last week, rounding out a buildup of U.S. military forces in the region that has not been seen for decades.The U.S. last week also designated the Cartel de los Soles, a group Washington alleges is run by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, as a foreign terrorist organization.Maduro has denied having any ties to the drug trade and has accused the U.S. of “fabricating” a war against him.Freddie ClaytonFreddie Clayton is a freelance journalist based in London. Katherine Doyle contributed.
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Nov. 29, 2025, 7:00 AM ESTBy Tyler Kingkade and Ben KamisarDuring a segment on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” in August, activist Christopher Rufo astonished the studio audience when he said the Watergate scandal that toppled President Richard Nixon “was a setup from start to finish.” The crowd hooted. Maher retorted that there were plenty of “smoking guns” showing the late president’s guilt. But Rufo insisted that there were federal agencies that had had illegal backdoor meetings and that there was a judge who was “out to get Nixon.”Maher muttered, “Oh, geez,” to which Rufo replied with a grin and a prediction: “Nixon vindication by 2035.”The Watergate scandal has long been viewed as a defining moment in presidential corruption and accountability, prompting a series of government transparency reforms and influencing generations of journalists. It became a shorthand comparison for political scandal and lent the omnipresent “-gate” suffix to many that followed.But those lessons are now being flipped by some of the most influential right-wing figures, including people known to have President Donald Trump’s ear, who insist that Watergate was actually an underhanded scheme by the “deep state” and the press to take down a popular Republican president.Watergate has often been invoked in comparison to Trump’s scandals, in both his first and current term. Many people — from historians to former Nixon officials — argue that were Watergate to happen in today’s media landscape, with the influence of conservative outlets and in particular Fox News, Nixon most likely would have survived it.“In some ways, the reframing of Watergate seems like an attempt to try and rehabilitate the current president’s image,” said Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning initiatives at the American Historical Association, a nonprofit professional organization. “In a lot of ways, it’s about what’s happened the last few years.”Michael Koncewicz, a historian who has been sounding the alarm on Watergate revisionism and who formerly worked at the Nixon presidential library, said the scandal has always been remembered as one in which “the system worked.” But if these pundits “can make Americans believe that that story is bulls—,” he said, “then they can ensure that another Watergate will never happen again.”Beyond Rufo, the conservative media personalities Tucker Carlson, Michael Knowles and Steve Bannon have pushed this revisionist Watergate narrative in the past year. Hillsdale College, a conservative college in Michigan, promoted and endorsed a Carlson podcast episode that described Watergate as a “scam.” Even actor Bill Murray suggested this year on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Nixon might have been “framed.”Republican-controlled states like Idaho and Louisiana have approved a video for use in public school social studies classes that was produced by the conservative media organization PragerU, in which the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt quotes a historian who argues that Watergate was the media’s attempt to reverse an election.Hewitt, who serves on the board of the Nixon Foundation, contends that the media and the “East Coast liberal elite” had it out for Nixon in part because of his “staunch anti-communist” views. PragerU worked over the past two years with many Republican-led states to get its content into public schools, and it recently partnered with the Trump administration on a civics education initiative. After Rufo’s proclamation on HBO, Marissa Streit, PragerU’s CEO, said he is “right about Nixon!” and directed people to watch Hewitt’s video on X.Through a spokesperson, Streit declined an interview request. In response to specific questions, PragerU said people should watch its Watergate content.Rufo also declined an interview request, but said in an email that the Nixon era is crucial to understanding why he believes politics has been in a loop since 1968. “To understand our moment — and to move beyond it — we must understand Nixon and learn from his experience, his successes, and his failures. BLM, Russiagate, gender ideology, left-wing terrorism: all of our current challenges can be understood through the prism,” Rufo said, of Nixon, “one of the twentieth century’s greatest presidents.”Hillsdale College, Hewitt and Idaho and Louisiana’s education agencies did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson and Bannon’s shows.Kenneth Hughes Jr., a researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, who is considered one of the foremost experts on the audiotapes from Nixon’s White House, said the recordings clearly demonstrate that Nixon was “the ring leader of the abuses of power that we group under the heading of Watergate.” “They do show Nixon deliberately, consciously and illegally weaponizing the government against those he considered political threats,” Hughes said.Nixon has always been a conflicted character in American consciousness. His congressional career defined him as a strident anti-communist, but as president he opened diplomacy with China. Liberals have praised him for signing Title IX and the Environmental Protection Agency into law but criticized his administration for launching a “war on drugs.”After losing the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race, Nixon famously told reporters that they “won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” only to then become president in 1968 and subsequently win every state except for Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in his 1972 re-election.The scandal that brought down Nixon, in oversimplified terms, centered around his complicity in attempts to cover up the involvement of members in his administration in a botched break-in to bug the Democratic Party’s headquarters. The fallout from the episode then exposed other illegal activity he authorized to go after political enemies.While the twists and turns were widely covered by multiple national media at the time, the scandal was immortalized by the book and film “All the President’s Men,” based on the work of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — relying in part on an anonymous source known as “Deep Throat” — to expose the plot.Nixon resigned in August 1974, once it became clear he’d lost the support of many Republicans in Congress and would likely face impeachment.“If Donald Trump and his advisors and his supporters, in the media and within his administration, can alter the history of Watergate, then they can pretty much change anything, and that’s why the history of Watergate matters so much,” said Koncewicz, associate director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.The revisionism arguments generally concede that the president’s aides and campaign staff were involved in boneheaded and nefarious activities. But they contend Nixon was oblivious to much of it until after it happened. And they say the true scandal was that Nixon’s due process rights were violated by prosecutors who secretly met with judges and by the release of confidential grand jury testimony to Congress.“It sends chills down your spine about how close this is to what they’re trying to do to President Trump right now with this radical judiciary,” Bannon said on his podcast in August.Monica Crowley, a Trump administration official and former Fox News host, said on a New York Post podcast in July that “the full vindication, I think, of President Nixon is coming to pass.” She said Trump passes Nixon’s portrait every day, and she sees the two men as similarly “forging their own path, which inevitably put them in a collision course with the deep state.”Many of these conservative commentators rely on or feature Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon administration lawyer, who’s written for decades about ways he believes the president was wronged in the Watergate investigation.Bannon, who helped run Trump’s first campaign and remains a loyal booster, provided his streaming subscribers with free access this past summer to a new documentary based on Shepard’s work. In September, a historian spotted one of Shepard’s Watergate books displayed prominently at the gift shop of the National Archives, which is currently managed by the former head of the Nixon Foundation.A key piece of Shepard’s argument is that the “smoking gun” tape is misunderstood. The tape is typically interpreted as showing that Nixon approved White House interference in the FBI probe into the DNC break-in, but according to Shepard, it was actually a narrow question as to whether investigators could look into donations the Department of Justice had deemed outside of the Watergate case. In other words, he writes on his website, it “did not remotely prove that Nixon was in on, much less directing, the cover-up from its outset.”Shepard, who is also on the Nixon Foundation’s board, declined an interview request, but said in an email that his focus has always been on ways he believes the Watergate Special Prosecution Force violated the due process rights of the president and his aides.“In short, lawfare (the misuse of criminal law to undercut political opponents) didn’t begin with President Trump; it began with President Nixon,” Shepard said.Jill Wine-Banks, an assistant Watergate special prosecutor, said these arguments are nonsense. Nixon’s team distributed cash as hush money payments, the president is on tape approving it, the grand jury testimony was provided to Congress through a judicial process and there were no secret meetings with a federal judge, she said. And the smoking gun tape includes Nixon giving instructions on how to tell the FBI to avoid questioning certain people that would expose where hush money payments came from.“That’s him directing an action,” she said in an interview. “How much more do you need than that for him to be guilty of the cover-up?”The Nixon Foundation, which gave Trump an Architect of Peace Award last month, has welcomed the newfound interest in dismantling the mainstream narrative around Watergate. On social media, the organization has amplified examples of popular pundits defending Nixon. It recently published a video featuring podcast host Michael Knowles describing him as “the first president taken down by the deep state.”Speaking at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, this month, Knowles said the investigations into Trump during his first term started the process of exonerating Nixon by demonstrating “the lengths to which ‘deep state’ would go to undermine the will of the electorate.” “Was it so crazy that the man whom they dubbed ‘Tricky Dick’ might be the target of their shenanigans?” Knowles said in his speech, later adding, “The forces that sought to destroy him are the forces that threaten us again.”Knowles was unavailable for an interview. Historians, however, argue that the only person who set up Nixon was Nixon himself.Hughes, from the University of Virginia, said Nixon pursued a cover-up to protect himself because he had committed crimes to target political enemies, and it’s what makes his actions most relevant today.“What Nixon hid, Trump is doing much more blatantly,” Hughes said. “He’s weaponizing the government against people who he deems political threats, and that’s just something that America has not allowed, and something that America came together against during Watergate.”Tyler KingkadeTyler Kingkade is a national reporter for NBC News, based in Los Angeles.Ben KamisarBen Kamisar is a national political reporter for NBC News
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Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 15, 2025, 5:08 PM EDTBy Kaitlin SullivanTwo months after she was born, Eliana Nachem got a cough that wouldn’t go away. Three weeks later, she also started having runny stool, prompting a visit to her pediatrician. Eliana didn’t have allergies or a gastrointestinal condition; instead, tests pointed to a problem with her immune system. At 4 months old, Eliana received her diagnosis: severe combined immunodeficiency, or SCID. Babies born with the extremely rare disease do not develop the cells required for a functioning immune system. Every germ becomes a potentially fatal threat and to stay healthy, children with the condition must live in a completely sterile environment. Without treatment, kids usually do not live past their second birthday.“I expected the worst, then I immediately went into research mode,” Eliana’s father, Jeff Nachem, said. The Nachems also got to work turning their home into a germ-free fortress, rehoming their pets, never opening the windows and opening the doors to outside as sparingly as possible. Eliana was kept inside, and on the rare instance when visitors came by, the family had disposable gowns, gloves and masks for them to wear. (SCID is sometimes referred to as “bubble boy disease.”) Eliana also started on a temporary therapy that replaced a missing enzyme in her body, called adenosine deaminase (ADA).In the midst of the strict protocol, they learned about a clinical trial in Los Angeles — 2,600 miles from their home in Fredericksburg, Virginia — that could help their daughter live a normal life.Jeff, Caroline and Eliana Nachem with Dr. Donald Kohn before Eliana’s gene therapy for ADA-SCID.Courtesy Caroline NachemScientists have identified about 20 gene variants that cause SCID. Eliana’s form of the disease, ADA-SCID, is diagnosed in fewer than 10 children born in the U.S. each year. (Under 100 babies are diagnosed with any form of SCID in a given year.)In 2014, when she was just 10 months old, Eliana was one of 62 children enrolled in a clinical trial for a gene therapy for ADA-SCID. In a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers followed up on the results of that Phase 2 clinical trial. The update reported that all 62 kids, who received the treatment from 2012 to 2019, are alive today. In 59 of them, including Eliana, the gene therapy completely restored immune function, without requiring any additional treatment — a success rate of 95%.“This is one of the most successful gene therapy trials for an ultra-rare genetic disease that we have,” said Dr. Talal Mousallem, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine. He was not involved with the trial. Correcting stem cellsThe treatment begins with doctors harvesting stem cells from the patient’s own bone marrow. These stem cells are purified in a lab, and then modified using an inactivated form of the virus that causes HIV. Instead of carrying the human immunodeficiency virus, this version carries the ADA gene that people with ADA-SCID are missing, reinserting the gene into the stem cell DNA. Before the customized treatment is reinfused back into the patient, they must undergo chemotherapy to get rid of the body’s existing stem cells and make room for the new ones. Once back in the body, the cells — which no longer carry the virus, just the gene it left behind — get to work building an immune system over the next year.“It’s a one-time delivery vehicle that takes the gene into the DNA of the stem cell, so every time it divides to make other cells, those cells carry that ADA gene,” said Dr. Donald Kohn, a pediatric bone marrow transplant physician at UCLA’s Broad Stem Cell Research Center, who led the trial. A less risky optionGene therapy clinical trials are underway for four subtypes of SCID, but the standard of care is still a bone marrow transplant, which builds an immune system using stem cells from a donor. The treatment can be risky and side effects further down the line.It’s ideal for bone marrow transplants to occur between siblings — who share about half of the same DNA — but two siblings only have about a 25% chance of being a match. In most cases, the donor is not a sibling, which introduces the risk that the donor’s immune cells will attack the recipient’s body, a phenomenon called graft-versus-host disease.The risk of graft-versus-host means kids who receive functioning stem cells from another person have to be on immunosuppressant drugs following the transplant, which keep the foreign cells from attacking their immune system.“Which slows down the progress, because you are suppressing the immune system while also trying to build an immune system,” Kohn said. People also have to undergo much higher doses of chemotherapy before receiving a donor bone marrow transplant than they do before undergoing gene therapy. “There can be effects [later in life] from being treated with chemotherapy, including growth, endocrine or fertility effects,” said Dr. Whitney Reid, an attending physician in the division of allergy and immunology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was not involved in the trial. With gene therapy, “you can give those patients much lower doses of chemotherapy and there is a much lower chance of rejection,” she said. Eliana “was able to go from living in isolation to being able to go to preschool and go swimming in a public pool and play on a playground, and do all the things that every other kid gets to do,” her father said. Courtesy Caroline Nachem Having another therapy for ADA-SCID is particularly important, Reid added. Changes in the ADA gene cause toxins to build up in clumps of white blood cells called lymphocytes. This can cause hearing loss and learning difficulties as kids get older. Unlike other types of SCID, “it doesn’t only affect the immune system,” Reid said. Mousallem, of Duke University, said he hopes the success of this trial will open the door to gene therapies for other rare diseases that often go untreated, as well as SCID caused by other gene variants. “The data is great for ADA-SCID, and it is our hope that one day this becomes the standard of care,” he said. Eliana turns 12 years old next week and loves going to dance classes.“It’s amazing that she was able to go from living in isolation to being able to go to preschool and go swimming in a public pool and play on a playground, and do all the things that every other kid gets to do,” her father said. Eliana still undergoes testing twice a year to make sure her immune system hasn’t weakened. So far, so good.“We think it’s a lifelong therapy,” Kohn said. “Some of these kids are now 15 years old and are living normal lives. We treated them when they were little babies and now they’re going to prom.”Kaitlin SullivanKaitlin Sullivan is a contributor for NBCNews.com who has worked with NBC News Investigations. She reports on health, science and the environment and is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York.
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