Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    US marshals ask Congress for $38m in security as threats against judges rise

    The United States Marshals Service is asking Congress for $38m to fund two new programs aimed at bolstering judicial security in response to a rise in threats against federal judges and justices on the supreme court.Both programs were tucked into the US justice department’s budget proposal unveiled on Monday and were part of the US Marshals Service’s overall request for $4bn for the 2025 fiscal year that begins 1 October.The budget request proposes using $28.1m to create a new office of protective services within the marshals agency’s judicial security division, which is tasked with protecting more than 2,700 sitting judges and managing courthouse security.The marshals are seeking 53 new positions for the office, which “will develop a strong framework for fulfilling protective responsibilities for the federal judiciary”, including the US supreme court, the justice department said.A Reuters investigation last month documented a sharp rise in threats and intimidation directed at judges who have been criticized by Donald Trump after ruling against the Republican former president’s interests in cases they were hearing.Serious threats overall against federal judges rose to 457 in fiscal year 2023, from 224 in fiscal year 2021, according to the marshals service.The marshals service is also seeking $10m for a new grant program that provides funding to state and local governments to prevent the personal information of federal judges and their family members from being disclosed in government databases or registries.That program was authorized by the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act, legislation that was passed in 2022 that sought to allow judges to shield their personal information from being viewed online.The bill was named for US district judge Esther Salas’s son, who was shot and killed at her home in New Jersey by a disgruntled lawyer in July 2020.The marshals service’s request for $38m in new judicial security funding is on top of $805.9m the judiciary itself is seeking for court security and $19.4m sought by the US supreme court.The supreme court’s request included funding to expand the security activities of the supreme court police and to let the court’s police take over the duties currently served by the marshals service of protecting the justices’ homes.The marshals service, when requested, also protects supreme court justices when they travel outside Washington.The high court in 2022 overturned its landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide, prompting protests outside the homes of members of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.An armed California man was charged in 2022 with attempting to assassinate conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh after being arrested near his home. That man, Nicholas John Roske, has pleaded not guilty in the case. More

  • 125 Shares199 Views

    in US Politics

    White House announces $300m stopgap military aid package for Ukraine

    The Pentagon will rush about $300m in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost savings in its contracts, even though the military remains deeply overdrawn and needs at least $10bn to replenish all the weapons it has pulled from its stocks to help Kyiv in its desperate fight against Russia, the White House announced on Tuesday. It’s the Pentagon’s first announced security package for Ukraine since December, when it acknowledged it was out of replenishment funds. It wasn’t until recent days that officials publicly acknowledged they weren’t just out of replenishment funds, but $10bn overdrawn. The announcement comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions and efforts to get fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition. US officials have insisted for months that the United States wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided the additional replenishment funds, which are part of the stalled supplemental spending bill.The replenishment funds have allowed the Pentagon to pull existing munitions, air defense systems and other weapons from its reserve inventories under presidential drawdown authority, or PDA, to send to Ukraine and then put contracts on order to replace those weapons, which are needed to maintain US military readiness.“When Russian troops advance and its guns fire, Ukraine does not have enough ammunition to fire back,” said the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in announcing the $300m in additional aid.The Pentagon also has had a separate Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, or USAI, which has allowed it to fund longer-term contracts with industry to produce new weapons for Ukraine.Senior defense officials who briefed reporters said the Pentagon was able to get cost savings in some of those longer-term contracts of roughly $300m and, given the battlefield situation, decided to use those savings to go ahead and send more weapons. The officials said the cost savings basically offset the new package and keep the replenishment spending underwater at $10bn.One of the officials said the package represented a “one-time shot” – unless Congress passes the supplemental spending bill, which includes roughly $60bn in military aid for Ukraine, or more cost savings are found. It is expected to include anti-aircraft missiles, artillery rounds and armor systems, the official said.The aid announcement comes as Polish leaders are in Washington to press the US to break its impasse over replenishing funds for Ukraine at a critical moment in the war. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, met on Tuesday with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate and was to meet with President Joe Biden later in the day.The House speaker, Mike Johnson, has so far refused to bring the $95bn package, which includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, to the floor. Seeking to put pressure on the Republican speaker, House Democrats have launched a long-shot effort to force a vote through a discharge petition. The seldom-successful procedure would require support from a majority of lawmakers, or 218 members, to move the aid package to a vote.Ukraine’s situation has become more dire, with units on the front line rationing munitions as they face a vastly better supplied Russian force. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has repeatedly implored Congress for help, but House Republican leadership has not been willing to bring the Ukraine aid package to the floor for a vote, saying any aid must first address border security needs.Pentagon officials said on Monday during budget briefing talks they were counting on the supplemental to cover the $10bn replenishment hole. This is the second time in less than nine months that the Pentagon has “found” money to use for additional weapons shipments to Ukraine. Last June, defense officials said they had overestimated the value of the weapons the US had sent to Ukraine by $6.2bn over the past two years.The United States has committed more than $44.9bn in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, including more than $44.2bn since the beginning of Russia’s invasion on 24 February 2022. More

  • 163 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    Special counsel says he was doing his job when he criticized Biden’s memory

    Robert Hur, the justice department special counsel assigned to report on Joe Biden’s possession of classified documents, told Congress he was just doing his job when he shook up the US election campaign by criticizing the president’s apparent inability to recall certain events.In his report released in February, Hur, a Republican former US attorney under Donald Trump, recommended Biden not be charged for possessing classified documents. But he infuriated the president’s Democratic allies by making repeated references to Biden’s age and memory as one reason for not indicting him, saying jurors would see him “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.“My task was to determine whether the president retained or disclosed national defense information willfully,” Hur said in his opening remarks to the House judiciary committee. “I could not make that determination without assessing the president’s state of mind. For that reason, I had to consider the president’s memory and overall mental state, and how a jury likely would perceive his memory and mental state in a criminal trial.”He defended his comments about Biden’s recollections, saying: “I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do.”Republicans are also unhappy with Hur’s finding that Biden should not be charged, arguing it was evidence of double standards at the justice department. A different special counsel, Jack Smith, has indicted Donald Trump for allegedly taking government secrets with him after leaving the White House and, unlike Biden, conspiring to keep them out of the hands of investigators. The justice department also decided last year not to bring charges against Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, after classified documents were found at his home.Both men were appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, but operate independently, while justice department policy also prohibits the indictment of sitting presidents.The judiciary committee’s chair, Trump ally Jim Jordan, sought to focus public attention on Hur’s conclusion that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency”.“Mr Hur produced a 345-page report, but in the end, it boils down to a few key facts. Joe Biden kept classified information. Joe Biden failed to properly secure classified information. And Joe Biden shared classified information with people he wasn’t supposed to,” Jordan said as the hearing began.Jerrold Nadler, the committee’s top Democrat, focused on how the special counsel cleared the president, and noted his cooperation with the investigation.“The Hur report represents the complete and total exoneration of President Biden,” Nadler said.“And how does that record contrast with President Trump, the documents he retained and the criminal charges pending against him in Florida?” Nadler continued, recounting the details of the former president’s alleged hoarding of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort.Trump is facing charges “not because of some vast conspiracy, not because the so-called deep state was out to get him, but because former president Trump was fundamentally incapable of taking advantage of even one of the many, many chances he was given to avoid those charges”, Nadler said.Hur made clear later on that he does not consider his report to be an “exoneration” of the president, saying “that is not a word that I used”.A transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, which lasted for hours over several days, was released shortly before the hearing began, and shows the president fumbled occasionally with the sequence of events and certain dates, but otherwise was sharp throughout, and also corrected Hur and others when they made errors.The Democratic congressman Adam Schiff seized on Hur’s insistence that he did not “disparage” Biden, saying he did just that by including details of the president’s ability to recalls details in his report.“You chose a general pejorative reference to the president. You understood when you made that decision, didn’t you Mr Hur, that you would ignite a political firestorm with that language, didn’t you?” Schiff asked.“Congressman, politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps,” Hur replied, saying he followed justice department policy in writing his report. More

  • 163 Shares189 Views

    in US Politics

    Robert Hur says Biden memory comments were ‘necessary, accurate and fair’ – video

    The former special counsel has defended comments he made on Joe Biden’s memory in his report on the US president’s handling of classified documents. Robert Hur appeared before a house judiciary committee on Tuesday, where he said: ‘I did not sanitise my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly. I explained to the attorney general my decision and the reasons for it. That’s what I was required to do’ More

  • 175 Shares169 Views

    in US Politics

    Divided Washington state to choose Biden or Trump: ‘Everything seems a mess right now’

    Had he heard it, Joe Biden would surely have been delighted by Bianca Siegl’s comment – and the fact she barely paused before making it.“Of course I will be voting on Tuesday,” says the 47-year-old, speaking at a farmers’ market in Seattle’s University district. “If Trump were to get elected, it would be incredibly dangerous for the world and for my family.”After Nikki Haley suspended her campaign following disappointing results on Super Tuesday and the US president made an unusually partisan and pugnacious State of the Union address, America is in general election campaign mode. While polls show up to 70% of people do not want to see a rematch between Biden and Donald Trump it appears that is set to happen. As the campaigns step up their efforts, Washington state holds its presidential primary on Tuesday. Selections for local legislators and federal lawmakers get made in the summer, so Tuesday is solely a choice for voters to show their preference between the 77-year-old former president and the 81-year-old incumbent.Tina Sutter is also backing Biden. The 46-year-old registered nurse says she tends not to get involved in politics as it does not make a “lot of difference”. Things are complicated by the fact her parents support Trump, and she “cannot speak to them about politics”. She is not voting on Tuesday, but will definitely do so in November.“Trump is terrifying and everybody needs to make sure we don’t go through that again,” she says. Her policy priorities are reproductive rights, social justice and the environment, all areas in which she believes Trump would move the nation backwards.Washington state’s heartland is famous for its fruit farms and being the nation’s largest producer of apples, so cities such as Seattle and Tacoma are known for markets where city residents are hours away selecting from apples such as Cosmic Crisp, Fuji and other less common varieties. Eastern and central Washington are more conservative than the west – the state’s two GOP-held congressional districts, the fifth and the fourth are in the east – and the markets can be a rare coming together of people who live on either side of the Cascade Mountains. At the same time, politics per se tends to be avoided.In 2020, exit polls showed more than 90% of Black women voted for Biden. But a 63-year-old stall holder who asks to be identified as Marylynn P says she is not prepared to say who she is voting for.“Everything seems a mess right now,” she says. “But there seemed to be [less undocumented immigration and] people pouring into our cities under Trump.”Trump certainly has his supporters, and they tend to be very committed indeed.Loren Culp, a former police chief, was backed by him in 2022 to oust the Republican congressman Dan Newhouse, one of 10 GOP “traitors” in the House who voted to impeach Trump over January 6. (While Newhouse held his seat, another Washington member of Congress who voted against Trump, Jaime Herrera Beutler, lost hers albeit to a Democrat, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who saw off a Trump-backed military veteran, Joe Kent.)Speaking from Goldendale in the south of the state, Culp says he is convinced Trump will win a second term.Biden rarely campaigns in Washington; the last Republican president to win the state was Ronald Reagan, but he comes for private fundraising events and to tap into the wealth of liberal-leaning tech-rich millionaires.In 2020, Biden beat Trump here 58 to 39, and a poll posted recently by the website FiveThirtyEight puts Biden leading Trump 54 to 38.Yet Biden may not have things entirely without a bump. As in Michigan and Minnesota, where 100,000 and 45,000 people respectively voted as “uncommitted”, activists in Washington are looking to send a similar protest message over the administration’s support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians.Most Washington voters cast ballots by mail once they are sent out in late February. The first release of results in the state typically skews more conservative than the electorate as a whole, then moves farther to the left over time as more results from later mail returns and same-day voting comes in.Rami Al-Kabra, the deputy mayor of the city of Bothell and an organizer for the uncommitted group, says “enough is enough”.“We need to do more than just calling and protesting in the streets. As Americans, the most precious tool we have is our right to vote.”Al-Kabra, who believes he is the only elected Palestinian American official in the state, added: “And in Washington, we have this uncommitted delegates option to leverage this.”Professor James Long, a political scientist at the University of Washington, says he will be watching how many vote “uncommitted”. Though he suspects some of those “uncommitted voters” will “return home” in November, there could be a number on Tuesday who want to express dissatisfaction.“We don’t have as large a pro-Gaza, or pro-Palestinian, cause as in Michigan, but we have a lot of people on the left,” he adds.While the Guardian spoke to several Democrats who said they would prefer a younger candidate than Biden, nobody said they had thought about picking “uncommitted”.Many said they felt the election of 2024 was too important to do anything that might weaken Biden’s chances.Roger Tucker, 68, a retired architect who was browsing the stands with his wife, Becky, 65, a former university administrator, said: “If Trump is in office for another four years, he’s going to be more powerful than before and less worried that people are going to push back on him.” More

  • 213 Shares139 Views

    in US Politics

    Trump’s love for Viktor Orbán hints at what another Trump term will look like | Jan-Werner Müller

    Donald Trump has not only run the Republican primaries like an incumbent, but on occasion, he gets to play-act the role of president right at home. On Friday, he hosted Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister,, for a quasi-state visit at his Mar-a-Lago estate, described by discerning critics as “the palace of a CEO-president-king, done up in the opulent dictator-chic favored by third-world kleptocrats”.Orbán has spent the past 14 years making his country into a kleptocratic autocracy right in the middle of the European Union. Obviously, Trump does not need general guidance from Orbán; he is already endowed with authoritarian instincts. But, for all the obvious differences between Orbán’s small European nation and the US, Orbán’s rule holds concrete lessons which the American right is ready to adopt. Given the excitement with which Trump acolytes have been promoting Orbán – and their frequent pilgrimages to Budapest as the capital of “national conservatism” – Hungary offers a preview of a second Trump term.Lesson number one: if you want to control the country, you must completely control your own party. After losing two successive national elections at the beginning of this century, it looked like Orbán’s career might be finished. Instead, he managed to govern his Fidesz party with an iron grip. It is not an accident that far-right populist leaders everywhere treat their parties as personal vehicles, with no real internal debates, let alone dissent, tolerated.That has consequences for a political system as a whole: the leader faces no restraints from political heavyweights who are fellow partisans – and who would have credibility with followers – when acting on the national stage. By 2020, Trump had already been transforming the Republican party into a kind of personality cult; that’s one reason nobody stopped him on the road to January 6. Friday marked another step in the total subjugation of the party, as Trump installed his daughter-in-law as co-chair (creating a political family business on the side).Of course, only Trump says the quiet part out loud and declares his desires for dictatorship; he has been raving about Orbán’s credentials as a “strong man” and a real “boss”. Trump’s acolytes are more guarded. One area where they don’t hold back, however, is education – they keep gushing about “Orbán’s model”. JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio, has declared universities “the enemy” and advised that “the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary”. Supposedly the lesson is not to “eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching”.What’s being previewed here? Hungary happens to be the only country in the European Union with a systematic and structural violation of academic freedom. There it’s the government which decides what counts as an academic subject and what doesn’t (gender studies does not, of course). Orbán has also forced one university to close its doors for evidently political reasons.The ideal is not only to assert control over education and culture but to make the state as such into a partisan instrument. Like other far-right populists, Orbán has replaced career civil servants with loyalists – a lesson US right-wingers are picking up eagerly. Before paying homage to the autocrat-in-exile in Palm Beach, Orbán spoke to the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank that has laid out with chilling precision a Trumpist plan for hijacking what should be a neutral bureaucracy in the name of destroying “the deep state”.Orbán has been Putin’s ally inside the EU, trying to block sanctions and withhold support for Ukraine whenever possible. On the surface, the affinity is ideological: both supposedly believe in “strong families” (never mind how Putin treats his own family, or possibly multiple families) and the assertion of “national sovereignty” in defending borders (never mind whether that involves invading other countries).Yet the relationship is ultimately transactional. Orbán will reach out to whichever power he can – including China and Iran – to bolster his regime at home. The “national conservatism” show, including its American Putin fanboys, is patently useful because it gets critics fixated on issues like same-sex marriage instead of corruption and the destruction of democracy. Trump’s transactional approach was evident during his time in office and, if re-elected, he’ll probably double down on it in a second term.Whether Trump has learned from his experience of the presidency is a hard question. What’s not hard is the question of whether Trump is eager for retribution. Orbán felt it a grave injustice that he lost the 2002 elections; when he returned to office in 2010, he did so with plenty of resentment and a strategy for never letting go of power again. It would be wrong to extrapolate too much from a country with a smaller population than Pennsylvania. But here the parallel between two politicians who Trump himself declared “twins” couldn’t be clearer.
    Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More

  • 188 Shares179 Views

    in US Politics

    Aide tried to stop Trump praising Hitler – by telling him Mussolini was ‘great guy’

    Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marines general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.“I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss.Sciutto is a CNN anchor and national security analyst. His new book, The Return of Great Powers, will be published on Tuesday. CNN published a preview on Monday.Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.“But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before.But Sciutto’s recounting of his conversation with Kelly comes amid resurgent fears over Trump’s authoritarian leanings, with Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee despite facing 91 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil defeats, and having seen off attempts to disqualify him for office.Kelly’s remarks to Sciutto were published shortly after Trump welcomed to his Florida home Viktor Orbán, the strongman leader of Hungary.Singing Trump’s praises, Orbán said that if Trump defeats Joe Biden for re-election, the US would not “give a penny” more in aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.Kelly told Sciutto Trump “thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim [Jong-un] was an OK guy … to him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have Nato, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”Trump recently said that if re-elected, he will encourage Russia to attack Nato members Trump deems not to pay enough into the alliance.Condemning those remarks as “dumb, shameful and un-American”, Biden has sought to portray Trump as a threat to world security as well as US democracy.Kelly told Sciutto: “The point is, [Trump] saw absolutely no point in Nato. He was [also] just dead set against having troops in South Korea, again, a deterrent force, or having troops in Japan, a deterrent force” to North Korea.Kelly was not the only general to fill a civil role in Trump’s administration. James Mattis, also a marine, was Trump’s first secretary of defense while HR McMaster, from the army, was Trump’s second national security adviser.Kelly told Sciutto Trump thought US generals would prove as loyal to him as German generals did to Hitler.“He would ask about the loyalty issues,” Kelly said, but “when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to [Hitler], and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, he didn’t know that.“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal – that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”A Trump spokesperson told CNN Kelly had “beclowned” himself and should “seek professional help”.Kelly said: “My theory on why [Trump] likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is.“Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.“But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send US forces places or to move money around within the budget. And he looked at Putin and Xi [Jinping, of China] and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.” More

  • 163 Shares109 Views

    in US Politics

    Biden budget plan details his vision: tax breaks for families and lower deficit

    Joe Biden took another swipe at Donald Trump on Monday as the president revealed his $7.3tn budget proposal for 2025 that offers tax breaks for families, lower healthcare costs, a smaller federal deficit and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.Biden made the remarks in an afternoon appearance in Goffstown, on the outskirts of Manchester, New Hampshire. Referring to the former president as “my predecessor”, as he did repeatedly during last week’s fiery State of the Union speech, Biden slammed Trump for “making $2tn in tax cuts” during his single term, and “expanding the federal deficit”.“I’m not anti-corporation. I’m a capitalist man. Make all the money you want. Just begin to pay your fair share in taxes,” he said. “A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great.”Unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law, the proposal for fiscal 2025 is an election-year blueprint about what the future could hold if Biden and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November. The president and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, with plans to provide the fine print on Monday.If the Biden budget became law, deficits could be pruned $3tn over a decade. Parents could get an increased child tax credit. Homebuyers could get a tax credit worth $9,600. Corporate taxes would jump upward, while billionaires would be charged a minimum tax of 25%.Biden also wants Medicare to have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200bn over 10 years.The president also called on Congress to apply his $2,000 cap on drug costs and $35 insulin to everyone, not just people who have Medicare. He is also seeking to make permanent some protections in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire next year.All of this is a chance for Biden to try to define the race on his preferred terms, just as the all-but-certain Republican nominee, Trump, wants to rally voters around his agenda.Trump, for his part, would like to increase tariffs and pump out gushers of oil. He called for a “second phase” of tax cuts as parts of his 2017 overhaul of the income tax code would expire after 2025. The Republican has also said he would slash government regulations. He has also pledged to pay down the national debt, though it is unclear how without him detailing severe spending cuts.“We’re going to do things that nobody thought was possible,” Trump said after his wins in last week’s Super Tuesday nomination contests.The Republican US presidential candidate, speaking in an interview on CNBC, also called for action on popular US entitlement programs, including cuts, and indicated he was not likely to curb use of cryptocurrencies.Asked about concerns over increased political polarization on the nation’s financial stability, Trump said he was concerned about Fitch’s 2023 downgrade but dismissed the credit rating downgrade’s ties to the January 6 riot at the Capitol.Trump’s comments are his first extended remarks on his economic plans since he became the party’s likely nominee following last week’s “Super Tuesday” primary elections, setting up a rematch with President Joe Biden in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHis tariff plan has spurred talk of inflation, and US treasury secretary Janet Yellen has said it would raise costs for American consumers.“I think taxes could be cut, I think other things could happen to more than adjust that. But I’m a big believer in tariffs,” Trump told CNBC, saying they help American industries when they are “being taken advantage of” by China and other nations.“Beyond the economics, it gives you power in dealing with other countries,” he said, adding that he was not concerned about any possible retaliatory tariffs if he were to regain the White House.Asked about Medicare, Social Security and Medicare programs and the nation’s spending and deficits, Trump told CNBC: “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management.”House Republicans on Thursday voted their own budget resolution for the next fiscal year out of committee, saying it would trim deficits by $14tn over 10 years. But their measure would depend on rosy economic forecasts and sharp spending cuts, reducing $8.7tn in Medicare and Medicaid expenditures. Biden has pledged to stop any cuts to Medicare.“The House’s budget blueprint reflects the values of hard-working Americans who know that in tough economic times, you don’t spend what you don’t have – our federal government must do the same,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, said in a statement.Meanwhile, Congress is still working on a budget for the current fiscal year. On Saturday, Biden signed into law a $460bn package to avoid a shutdown of several federal agencies, but lawmakers are only about halfway through addressing spending for this fiscal year. More