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    Trump announces 25% tariffs on all cars not made in US amid scrutiny over Signal leak – live

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    “This is the beginning of liberation day in America,” Donald Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office now for his remarks on new tariffs on cars made outside the United States. At the start of remarks being streamed live on the White House YouTube channel, the president said that tariffs of 25% will be imposed on all imported cars.The tariffs will apply to finished cars and trucks that are shipped into the United States, including those made by US auto companies whose automobiles that are made overseas.Asked by a reporter if the tariffs could be lifted before the end of his term of office, Trump said that the new 25% rate on foreign-made cars are “permanent, 100%”.The president just signed an executive order to put 25% tariffs on cars imported into the United States which, he says, will take effect on 2 April.Asked by a reporter how he will ensure that a car made largely outside the country is not completed in the US to avoid tariffs, Trump claims that there will be “strong policing” to prevent automakers from dodging tariffs.The president called the current system, in which cars are made in multiple countries, “ridiculous”.“This is the beginning of liberation day in America,” Donald Trump told reporters gathered in the Oval Office now for his remarks on new tariffs on cars made outside the United States. At the start of remarks being streamed live on the White House YouTube channel, the president said that tariffs of 25% will be imposed on all imported cars.The tariffs will apply to finished cars and trucks that are shipped into the United States, including those made by US auto companies whose automobiles that are made overseas.While fears have been raised about the possibility that Steve Witkoff, the president’s envoy to Russia, was vulnerable to hacking because he was in Moscow when he was added to the Signal messaging chat about attacking Yemen (a concern Witkoff dismissed by saying he did not use his personal device on that trip), it has been somewhat overlooked that Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who created the group, was in Saudi Arabia on the day he accidentally invited the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to connect with him on the messaging app.In his first report on the incident for the Atlantic, Goldberg wrote: “On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz.”Since Goldberg did not specify the time of day that the invitation was sent, it is not certain where Waltz was when he sent the request, which was almost certainly sent from his nonsecure, personal phone. (It has been previously reported that the open-source Signal app cannot be downloaded on to secure government devices, although recent statements from the CIA director suggest that might no longer be true.)But we do know that Waltz spent much or all of that day in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where he and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, engaged in talks with senior Ukrainian officials over a plan for a 30-day ceasefire in Ukraine’s war to repel the full-scale Russian invasion that began in 2022.Since Waltz and Rubio spoke to reporters after 9pm local time in Jeddah that night, to announce that Ukraine had accepted the proposal, we know that Waltz was in a Saudi government-secured facility for most of that day, when, presumably, his personal phone would have been vulnerable to hacking by US adversaries, like Russia or China, and even US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Ukraine.It is not clear when Waltz left Saudi Arabia, but he was certainly there for most, if not all, of 11 March. Waltz and Rubio met with the Saudi crown prince, Mohamed bin Salman, in Jeddah on the evening 10 March, and Rubio’s itinerary on the state department’s website indicates that the secretary of state did not leave Saudi Arabia until 12 March, when he flew to Ireland and then to Canada.Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois released a statement calling for defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s resignation.“Pete Hegseth is a f*cking liar. This is so clearly classified info he recklessly leaked that could’ve gotten our pilots killed. He needs to resign in disgrace immediately,” reads the statement.“Hegseth and every other official who was included in this group chat must be subject to an independent investigation. If Republicans won’t join us in holding the Trump Administration accountable, then they are complicit in this dangerous and likely criminal breach of our national security.”Secretary of defense Pete Hegseth denied claims that the information he texted other Trump officials in a group chat earlier this month discussed classified war plans.“Nobody’s texting war plans,” he told reporters in Hawaii. “As a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans, because they know it’s not war plans,” he said.Canada’s former spy chief says White House response to Signal leak threatens ‘Five Eyes’ securityCanada’s former spy chief has said the Trump administration’s attempts to downplay the leak of top-secret attack plans is a “very worrying” development, with implications for broader intelligence sharing among US allies.On Wednesday, the Atlantic magazine published new and detailed messages from a group chat, including plans for US bombings, drone launches and targeting information of the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions. Among the recipients of the messages was a prominent journalist, who was inadvertently added to the group.“This is very worrying. Canada needs to think about what this means in practical terms: is the United States prepared to protect our secrets, as we are bound to protect theirs?” said Richard Fadden, the former head of Canada’s intelligence agency. “Every country has experienced leaks, of varying severity. The problem with this one is that it’s being generated at the highest levels of the US government – and they haven’t admitted that it’s a problem.”Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand have for decades shared intelligence in a pact informally known as the Five Eyes. But the leak of classified information is likely to put further strain on the group as it weighs how seriously the current American administration takes the handling of top secret information.“When we have intelligence leaks, we admit it, we try to sort out what’s happened and we try to fix it. One doesn’t get the impression today that the US cabinet members will admit there’s a problem,” said Fadden, who also served as national security adviser to Canada’s Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. “They’re just trying to clean it up from a political perspective. That worries me.”Despite a far more detailed picture of the information leaked to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, the White House and key figures in the message thread have redoubled efforts to claimed none of the information was classified.Read the full story by The Guardian’s Leyland Cecco:Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the accidental inclusion of the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal group chat was a “big mistake” but said that that “none of the information on there at any point threatened the operation or the lives of our service members.”Speaking to reporters from Jamaica, Rubio said:
    Obviously someone made a mistake, someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists but you ain’t supposed to be on that … I contributed to it twice. I identified my point of contact … and then later on, I think 3 hours after the White House’s official announcements have been made, I congratulated the members of the team.
    Rubio went on to add:
    I’ve been assured by the Pentagon and everyone involved that none of the information that was on there … at any point threatened the operation of the lives of our servicemen and in fact it was a very successful operation … I want everybody to understand why this thing was even set up in the first place and also understand very clearly the mission was successful and at no point was it in danger and that’s coming from the highest ranking officials…
    Another Democrat, the Florida representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost, has criticized the contents of the Signal group chat to which the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added.Writing on X in response to a screenshot that featured JD Vance’s reply to the US’s bombing in Yemen, Frost said:“Another disgusting part of all this is the proof of a blatant war crime to which the vice president of the United States responded: Excellent.”During a press briefing in Warsaw, Poland, Nato secretary general Mark Rutte was asked if Europeans could still trust the Americans after the Signal leaks.“Absolutely. Can we trust the Americans? Yes, they are our biggest partner, the biggest allies in Nato. They have freed my country together with Poland and Canada after the Second World War. Yes, absolutely. We can trust the Americans.”He was later asked about some of the comments made about “free-loading” Europeans.Rutte said he would not want to offer running commentary as that “would not be appropriate,” but acknowledged two main irritants in the new US administration’s relations with European Nato allies, on fair burden sharing and some caveats in “collective endeavours.”“We are addressing them because we are spending much more and we are working on, as I said, on the lethality of Nato, which is crucial,” he said.Here’s a look at where the day stands:

    Democrats are calling on defense secretary Pete Hegseth to resign following the Signal group chat scandal. One Democrat, Illinois’s representative Raja Krishnamoorthi said: “Classified information is classified for a reason. Sec. Hegseth was openly sharing classified materials on an insecure channel that potentially endangered service members. And then he lied about it. He should resign.”

    White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Elon Musk’s team is investigating how the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was added to the group chat discussing a military strike in Yemen. “As for your original question about who’s leading, looking into the messaging thread: the national security council, the White House counsel’s office, and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team,” she said during a press briefing.

    In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly. “This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.

    The US district court judge James Boasberg, whom the government has argued cannot be trusted with sensitive information in the Alien Enemies Act case, has been assigned to oversee a lawsuit alleging that government officials violated federal record-keeping laws when they used a group chat to discuss a planned military strike in Yemen, Politico reports. “Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including, but not limited to, national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations,” the plaintiffs argue.

    Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who grilled top security officials during Tuesday’s Senate intelligence committee briefing, appeared on Morning Joe this morning to discuss the recently released text messages published by the Atlantic on Wednesday. “Well it sure answers that the two witnesses I believe lied when they said, ‘Oh, nothing to see here, nothing classified,’” he said.
    Republican senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Senate armed services committee, said he and the senator Jack Reed, the committee’s top Democrat, will request an inspector general investigation into the use of Signal by top national security officials to discuss military plans, The Associated Press reports.Wicker is also calling for a classified Senate briefing from a top national security official and verification that the Atlantic published an accurate transcript of the Signal chat.This move is notable given the Trump administration’s defiance that no classified information was posted to the Signal chat.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Elon Musk’s team is investigating how the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was added to the group chat discussing a military strike in Yemen.“As for your original question about who’s leading, looking into the messaging thread: the national security council, the White House counsel’s office, and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team,” she said during a press briefing.“Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt added.She also said that the Signal messaging app, where senior Trump administration officials accidentally shared military plans in a group containing a journalist, is an approved app.Leavitt said it is loaded on to government phones at the Pentagon, Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency.Donald Trump will hold a press conference to announce tariffs on the auto industry today at 4pm, according to the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.Wednesday’s press conference will be in the Oval Office.National security adviser Michael Waltz said on Fox News that a staffer wasn’t responsible for adding the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief to the group chat and that he “takes full responsibility” for building the group and maintaining coordination.“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name and then you have somebody else’s number?,” Waltz said.“You have somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact, so of course I didn’t see this loser in the group,” he added, referring to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont offers an analysis of what the latest Signal leak revelations expose:The disclosure by the Atlantic of further devastating messages from the Signal chat group used by the Trump administration’s most senior security officials has nailed the lie that nothing that threatened the safety of US servicemen and women was shared on the group.After the vague and evasive assertions by Trump officials at Monday’s Senate intelligence committee hearing, from the White House, and from the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, that no war plans or classified material was shared, readers can make up their own minds.Despite Hegseth’s angry denial, the exchanges in the leaked group chat did contain details of war planning, shared recklessly by him in advance of the attack on 15 March, on a messaging system and perhaps devices which he and others in the chat could not have been certain were secure.Most damning is the fact that Hegseth sent details in advance of the F-18s and other aircraft that would take part in the attack, including the timing of their arrival at targets, and other assets that would be deployed.As Ryan Goodman, a law professor who formerly worked at the Pentagon, put it after the latest release: “The Atlantic has now published the Signal texts with attack plans in response to administration denials. I worked at the Pentagon. If information like this is not classified, nothing is. If Hegseth is claiming he declassified this information, he should be shown the door for having done so.”In attempting to cover up and diminish their culpability for a shocking breach of operational security – including the fact that two participants in the chat were overseas (including one in Moscow at the time) – the Trump administration has made the scandal immeasurably more serious than it was already.At the most simple level, the pilots who flew on those strikes should rightly be furious that the most senior civilian defence official placed them in harm’s way.Read the full analysis here:In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.The Trump administration has been facing criticism from Democrats – and now Republicans – after Monday’s embarrassing revelation that a team of senior national security officials accidentally added a journalist to a private group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. The group, which included the vice-president, JD Vance; the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; the secretary of state, Marco Rubio; and others, discussed sensitive plans to engage in military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.On Wednesday morning the Atlantic posted another tranche of messages that contained details of the attack on Yemen, including descriptions of targets, launch times and even the details of weather during the assault.Senior national security officials testified before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, where the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director, John Ratcliffe, were grilled by lawmakers over the scandal. The national security officials said “no classified material” was shared in the chat. Republicans are now calling for investigations as well.Read the full story by José Olivares here: More

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      Greenpeace says Dakota Access pipeline defamation verdict risks ‘destroying right to peaceful protest’ – live

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      Steven Donziger is perhaps the best-known member of the trial monitoring committee that has been in court throughout the Energy Transfer v Greenpeace case.Donziger is an environmental lawyer who won a multibillion-dollar judgment in Ecuador against Chevron over contamination in the Lago Agrio region, but ended up under house arrest for years, after the oil giant countersued him seeking $60bn in damages.Here, in a video released this week before the verdict, is how Donziger explains what is at stake in this legal effort to silence dissent he compares to the government’s arrest of Mahmoud Khalil:Here is some useful background on the lawsuit against Greenpeace, from an article published last month by our colleagues Nina Lakhani and Rachel Leingang.Energy Transfer Partners, a Dallas-based oil and gas company worth almost $70bn, had accused Greenpeace of defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline (Dapl).The anti-pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017 were organised by Standing Rock and other Sioux tribes and supported by more than 300 sovereign tribal nations, inspiring an international solidarity movement after Energy Transfer’s private security unleashed attack dogs and pepper spray against nonviolent protesters.Tens of thousands of people from across the country and world participated in the Dapl protests, and Greenpeace was among scores of non-profit groups that supported the Standing Rock tribe’s opposition to the pipeline.But Energy Transfer alleges in court filings that thousands of protestors were “incited” to come to North Dakota thanks to a “misinformation campaign” by Greenpeace.The lawsuit has been widely denounced as a classic strategic lawsuit against public participation (Slapp) – a form of civil litigation increasingly deployed by corporations, politicians and wealthy individuals to deliberately wear down and silence critics including journalists, activists and watchdog groups.For more, read the whole article, here:A team of 12 independent prominent civil rights attorneys and advocates who monitored the Greenpeace trial amid concerns about judicial bias and violations of due process released the following statement deploring the verdict:
      It is our collective assessment that the jury verdict against Greenpeace in North Dakota reflects a deeply flawed trial with multiple due process violations that denied Greenpeace the ability to present anything close to a full defense. Attorneys on our team monitored every minute of the proceedings and found multiple violations of due process that denied Greenpeace its right to a fair trial. The problems included a jury that was patently biased in favor of Energy Transfer, with many members working in the fossil fuel industry; a judge who lacked the requisite experience and legal knowledge to rule properly on the complex First Amendment and other evidentiary issues at the center of the case; and incendiary and prejudicial statements by lawyers for Energy Transfer that tried to criminalize Greenpeace and by extension the entire climate movement by attacking constitutionally-protected advocacy.
      Our fear that this was an illegitimate corporate-funded SLAPP harassment case was confirmed by our observations. We will be issuing a full report documenting these violations and larger flaws in the case in the coming weeks. While the trial court verdict is in, the case is far from over. Greenpeace has a right to appeal to the North Dakota Supreme Court and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court. Our committee will continue its work monitoring this critically important case that raises troubling concerns for all advocates in the country.
      The monitors who released the statement include: Marty Garbus, a trial attorney who has represented Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, Cesar Chavez, and Vaclav Havel; Natali Segovia, director of Water Protector Legal Collective; Steven Donziger, an environmental and human rights advocate (and Guardian US columnist); Jeanne Mirer, president of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers; Scott Wilson Badenoch, Jr., a fellow of the American Bar Foundation; Wade McMullen, a distinguished fellow of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown University Law Center.As our colleagues Rachel Leingang and Nina Lakhani report, a jury in North Dakota has decided that the environmental group Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the pipeline company Energy Transfer and is liable over defamation and other claims over protests in the state nearly a decade ago.Greenpeace, which had denied the claims, said in a statement after the verdict that lawsuits like this were aimed at “destroying the right to peaceful protest”; constitutional rights experts had expressed fears that case could have a wider chilling effect on free speech.Here is the complete statement on the verdict from Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal advisor, Greenpeace USA, sent to the Guardian:
      What we saw over these three weeks was Energy Transfer’s blatant disregard for the voices of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. And while they also tried to distort the truth about Greenpeace’s role in the protests, we instead reaffirmed our unwavering commitment to non-violence in every action we take. After almost eight years, we were proud to share our story with the people of Mandan and beyond. To be clear, Greenpeace’s story is not the story of Standing Rock; that is not ours to tell, despite the allegations in the lawsuit. Our story is how an organization like Greenpeace USA can support critical fights to protect communities most impacted by the climate crisis, as well as continued attacks on Indigenous sovereignty. We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech. Greenpeace will continue to do its part to fight for the protection of these fundamental rights for everyone.
      Kristin Casper, the general counsel for Greenpeace International said:
      The fight against Big Oil isn’t over today, and we know that the truth and the law are on our side. Greenpeace International will continue to campaign for a green and peaceful future. Energy Transfer hasn’t heard the last of us in this fight. We’re just getting started with our anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer’s attacks on free speech and peaceful protest. We will see Energy Transfer in court this July in the Netherlands. We will not back down, we will not be silenced.
      Read Rachel and Nina’s detailed report on the verdict, and its implications here:A North Dakota jury has found Greenpeace liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to an energy company over protests against a pipeline being constructed in the state.The verdict stems from a lawsuit filed by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, which sought $300m in damages from Greenpeace for defamation and orchestrating criminal behavior by protesters at the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Greenpeace has warned paying such a large judgment could bankrupt their US operation.Here’s more on the verdict:Last week, the Trump administration asked the supreme court to quickly overturn lower court rulings that blocked its attempt to curtail birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.The Associated Press reports that the request may also offer the conservative-dominated bench the opportunity to cut down on the practice of a single judge halting a policy nationwide. But, for whatever reason, the justices do not seem interested in ruling quickly on the issue.Here’s more, from the AP:
      The Supreme Court seems to be in no hurry to address an issue that has irritated Republican and Democratic administrations alike: the ability of a single judge to block a nationwide policy.
      Federal judges responding to a flurry of lawsuits have stopped or slowed one Trump administration action after another, from efforts to restrict birthright citizenship to freezes on domestic and international spending.
      While several justices have expressed concern about the use of so-called nationwide, or universal, injunctions, the high court has sidestepped multiple requests to do something about them.
      The latest plea comes in the form of an emergency appeal the Justice Department filed with the court last week, seeking to narrow orders issued by judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington that prohibit the nationwide enforcement of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump to restrict birthright citizenship.
      The justices usually order the other side in an emergency appeal to respond in a few days or a week. But in this case, they have set a deadline of April 4, without offering any explanation.
      The Trump administration’s cancellation of an affordable repayment plan for student loans has prompted a lawsuit from the American Federal of Teachers, the Guardian’s Michael Sainato reports:A top teachers union has sued the US Department of Education after it stopped processing applications for affordable repayment plans of student loans last month and disabled the online application for the programs.The American Federation of Teachers, or AFT – one the country’s largest unions, representing 1.8 million workers – filed a lawsuit alleging the sweeping action violates federal law.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington DC, seeks a court order to restore access to these programs.Another court order last month shut out borrowers of student loans from participating in four income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, which tie income to student loan payments, designed to keep payments affordable and avoid defaults on loans.“By effectively freezing the nation’s student loan system, the new administration seems intent on making life harder for working people, including for millions of borrowers who have taken on student debt so they can go to college,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT. “The former president tried to fix the system for 45 million Americans, but the new president is breaking it again.”The Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is standing by his vote to fund the government, even as the calls for him to step aside grow.“I believe so strongly I did the right thing for all the flack I’m getting,” Schumer said in an interview on Morning Joe.He said he understood Democrats’ desire to stand up to Trump, but warned that forcing a shutdown was not the way to do it. “Let’s stand up to him smart. Let’s not give him the keys to the kingdom.”One major activist group, Indivisible, has already called on Schumer to resign as leader and constituents are raising the issue at town halls. According to Axios, at least two House Democrats responded yes when asked at a town hall whether Senate Democrats need new leadership.Schumer this weekend cancelled several stops on a tour for his forthcoming book, citing security concerns after progressive groups announced plans to protest the New York Democrat’s decision to lend his vote to a Republican funding bill.Schumer has argued that he does not support the bill, but feared a government shutdown at the exact moment Donald Trump and Elon Musk are trying to downsize the federal workforce would have been a far worse outcome.“If we shut down the government and they started doing all these bad things, in a month, those folks would be saying, hey, save Medicaid, save our rural hospitals, save this, save that, and we’ll say we can’t, there’s a government shutdown. And then they would come to us and say, so why’d you let it happen?” Schumer argued on Morning Joe. “I prevented that from happening, and I think my caucus, no matter which way they voted, understands that.The House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has declined to say publicly whether he continues to support Schumer. On Tuesday the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi offered a sharp critique of Schumer’s strategy: “I myself don’t give away anything for nothing. I think that’s what happened the other day,” she said, according to Politico. Unlike Jeffries, Pelosi said she still has confidence in Schumer’s leadership.Officials at the US Federal Reserve cut their US economic growth forecasts and raised their projections for price growth as they kept interest rates on hold.“Uncertainty around the economic outlook has increased,” the central bank said in a statement, as Donald Trump’s bid to overhaul the global economy with sweeping tariffs sparks concern over inflation and growth.Policymakers at the Fed expect inflation to increase by an average rate of 2.7% this year, according to projections released on Wednesday, up from a previous estimate of 2.5%.They expect US gross domestic product (GDP) – a broad measure of economic health – to rise by 1.7% this year, down from an estimate of 2.1% in December. Officials also revised down their projections for GDP growth in 2026 and 2027, to 1.8%.Uncertainty is “unusually elevated”, the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, cautioned, as the Trump administration attempts to engineer radical economic change. Some of the increase in the Fed’s inflation expectations was “clearly” due to tariffs, he said. More

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      Michael Lewis and John Lanchester: ‘Trump is a trust-destroying machine’

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      In late 2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype people had in their heads about civil servants”.Other writers might shrink away from the notion that they could restrain a US president with a handful of essays, but Lewis has an outsized sway. Author of such mega-bestsellers as Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, he has a knack for writing about arcane concepts in business, finance and economics in ways that don’t just enlighten the uninitiated but whip along with the pace of an airport thriller. Hollywood loves him: Moneyball, The Blind Side and The Big Short all got turned into hit movies crammed with A-listers. So when Lewis speaks out about the forces shaping our world, even if it concerns something as seemingly unsexy as the federal government, people tend to listen.View image in fullscreenThe British writer John Lanchester, who contributed a standout piece to the series, got a glimpse of Lewis’s appeal when they first met in 2014. It was behind the stage at the London School of Economics. Lanchester had agreed to interview Lewis about Flash Boys, which plumbs the murky world of high-frequency trading. “Not only was the venue sold out,” Lanchester recalls, “but they’d had to add on another room at the theatre for people to watch, and that was sold out too. I remember thinking: ‘There’s a tube strike on, it’s absolutely pissing down, nobody’s going to come.’ But not a bit of it. The place was packed.”Lanchester is no slouch himself when it comes to turning knotty financial matters into page-turners. An acclaimed novelist (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital) who used to review restaurants for the Guardian, in 2010 he published a book about the financial crash – Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay – that gave a sweeping overview of the global economy while mercilessly skewering its absurdities. Now he regularly takes his filleting knife to topics ranging from Brexit to cryptocurrencies for the London Review of Books.View image in fullscreenSince their 2014 meeting, the pair have become good friends, with an odd-couple dynamic that’s entertaining to witness. Lewis is hyper-engaged and talks in a confident New Orleans drawl about the iniquities of Trump and Elon Musk; Lanchester, joining us from his kitchen in London, seems more mild-mannered at first but his easy-going demeanour hides a biting wit. They clearly enjoy each other’s work and company. “I make a point of inviting him for dinner whenever I’m in London,” says Lewis, “and I try to get him over here whenever I can. And of course I looped him into this series …”Who Is Government? isn’t Lewis’s first foray into the workings of the US civil service. In 2017, soon after Trump got in for the first time, Lewis had an insight into just how unprepared the new president was to take over the US government’s various branches. “The Obama administration had spent six months preparing a series of briefings for the transition,” he recalls, “but then Trump won and he just didn’t show up. So I decided to fly to Washington and find out what went on inside the government.” He wrote up his findings in three articles for Vanity Fair, later gathering them into the 2018 bestselling book The Fifth Risk. Among the people he spoke to who’d been neglected by the Trump team were officials tending the US nuclear arsenal.View image in fullscreenAs the 2024 election approached, amid warnings that Trump might do much worse than neglect the civil service if he got back into power, Lewis decided to revisit the government’s inner workings. Joining him for the ride this time was Dave Eggers, who reported on a team of scientists probing for extraterrestrial life from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In turn, Geraldine Brooks profiled online sleuths at the Internal Revenue Service who uncover evidence of cybercrime and child sexual abuse in the darker regions of the net, and W Kamau Bell wrote touchingly about his Black goddaughter’s work as a paralegal at the justice department.For his part, Lewis tracked down a mining engineer at the labour department named Christopher Mark, whose research had helped prevent fatal roof falls in underground mines. He also wrote about Heather Stone, a rare-diseases expert at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had saved lives by fast-tracking authorisation for an experimental drug to treat potentially lethal balamuthia infections.Lanchester, meanwhile, opted to write not about a person but a number – the consumer price index, a fiendishly complex statistic that acts as the main official measure of inflation. The lack of a human protagonist doesn’t make the piece any less absorbing, and Lanchester has fun uncovering the staggering amount of data on seemingly insignificant matters (such as the average length of the adult bedbug or the average annual income for a nuclear medicine technologist in Albany, New York) that the federal government hoovers up every year.View image in fullscreenThe overall effect of the series, just published as a book –Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service – is to transform civil servants from faceless bureaucrats into selfless superheroes. It’s a cracking read but sadly, contrary to Lewis’s hopes, it did nothing to prevent the flurry of devastating cuts that Trump and Musk, via his “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have inflicted on the government over the past couple of months. Of the 3 million-plus federal workers, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 have already been fired. Many of the subjects of the book are at risk of losing their jobs.“Maybe we’re in early stages in the war, but it’s amazing how little effect the series has had,” Lewis says ruefully. “Not only have I not heard a peep from Doge, but I haven’t had any sense that they were worried about what I might write. Though I did send Elon Musk an email asking if I can move in and watch what he was doing. He didn’t respond.”Musk isn’t the only tech billionaire behaving erratically. From conception to publication, the Washington Post series had the full support of the newspaper’s owner. “Jeff Bezos was very excited to be covering the government in any way you could,” says Lewis. “Every piece, he’d call [then opinion editor] David Shipley, and Shipley would call me, saying: ‘Bezos loves this thing.’ But things have changed.” The day before our conversation, in a move widely interpreted as a knee-bend to Trump, Bezos announced that the newspaper’s opinion section would now be dedicated to supporting “personal liberties and free markets”. Shipley resigned before the announcement.Now Lewis and Lanchester are looking back at a collection of essays conceived in a more hopeful time and wondering what will become of the departments they wrote about – and the country that relies on them. They are not optimistic. Over the course of our 90-minute conversation towards the end of last month, they talked about the motivation behind Trump and Musk’s war on the civil service, its probable effects on the US and the lessons the UK should be taking.You say in the intro to Who Is Government? that “the sort of people who become civil servants tend not to want or seek attention”. Was it hard to find interesting people to write about?ML: It took about a nanosecond. And I think there’s a reason for that: there are just a lot of great subjects [in the federal government], and the minute they face existential risk, they become really interesting. They’re weird and different. They’re not interested in money, for a start. They’ve got some purpose in their lives.Was the entire series written before Trump’s re-election?ML: All except for the last piece [about rare diseases expert Heather Stone], which was conceived before, but I didn’t write it until after. What I’m doing now is getting all the writers to go back to their characters to ask what’s happening to them. Both my characters look like they’re about to be fired. Heather has been told that the whole enterprise of dealing with infectious disease is going to be axed from the FDA. And [mining engineer] Chris Mark texted me the other day to say: “They’ve cut our purchasing authority and they want us to hand in our credit cards.” So if they’re not gone, most of our characters are disabled. It’s like watching a toddler loose inside of a nuclear reactor pushing buttons.You two are watching from afar. Are you watching the end of our democracy? Or are you watching some kind of false jeopardy situation?
      JL: Well, we had an exchange over email about this, and I’ve been thinking about what you said, Michael, that we’ll probably muddle through but we are playing Russian roulette with democracy. That image lodged in my head. And the thing that is deeply shocking and surprising is that nobody seems to give a shit about [the government cuts].The cuts are being made in the name of efficiency but it looks more like an ideological purge. Is that how you see it?ML: I don’t think it’s one person’s will being exerted; it’s a combination of Trump, Musk and Russell Vought, who’s now the director of the office of management and budget. He was the architect of that Project 2025 book and he’s a Christian nationalist-slash-libertarian, whatever that is. Trump is the easiest to grok. He’s a trust-destroying machine. He needs chaos where nobody trusts anybody and then there’s a weird level playing field, and he excels in that environment.My simple view of Musk is that he’s like an addict. He’s addicted to the attention, the drama – he’s stuck his finger in the social media socket and his brain is fried. He’s probably got cheerleaders, his little Silicon Valley crowd, telling him he’s doing a great thing, but most of them don’t know anything about it or the consequences. Vought’s the only one, I think, with a clear vision, but it’s a weird vision – really drastically minimum government. Those are the threads I see of what’s going on, and the backdrop is that they can do anything and the polls don’t move – people here don’t seem to care.But isn’t it only a matter of time before people do start to care… once the effects of the cuts kick in?ML: The pessimistic response is that, when things go wrong, there’ll be a war of narratives. The Trump narrative will inevitably say something like: “These bureaucrats screwed it up,” and it creates even more mistrust in the thing that you actually need to repair. I do think we’re going to muddle through. But I don’t think Trump’s ever going to get blamed in the ways he ought to. And whoever comes and fixes it is never going to get the credit they should.JL: When you look at the historical analogies to this kind of collective delusion, it’s quite hard to think of a way of recovering from losing a sense of an agreed consensus reality. The only historical examples I can think of is, basically, you lose a catastrophic war. You know, the Germans lose and they wake up and they have a reckoning with their past. But that’s historically quite rare and hard to imagine … But maybe that’s too dark. Maybe what happens is specific impacts arise from specific programmes being cut that make people think: “Oh, actually, that’s not such a great idea.”A clip just circulated of Musk talking about the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and he said something like: “Oh yeah, we made a couple little mistakes, like we briefly cut Ebola prevention there for just a second, then we brought it back again.”And then I saw someone who ran the USAid Ebola response during one of the outbreaks saying: “That’s flatly not true [that Musk restored the Ebola response].” Musk talks loudly about fraud and theft in government, but these things aren’t fraud and theft – they’re just programmes they don’t like. In fact I haven’t actually seen anything that you could with a straight face categorise as fraud – have you, Michael?ML: There’s almost no worse place to be trying to engage in fraud or theft than the US government, because there are so many eyes on you. When you take a federal employee out to lunch, they won’t let you pay for their sandwich – they’re so terrified. In fact it’s far easier to engage in fraud and theft in a Wall Street bank or a Silicon Valley startup, and there’s probably much more waste too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHas either of you met Musk?ML: I have not. I have lots of one degree of separations. Walter Isaacson, who wrote Musk’s biography, is an old friend. I basically watched him do that project – I followed it blow by blow.JL: Isaacson basically lived with Musk for, what, nine months, and there’s not a single commentary on politics at any point in the whole book. In 2022, Musk was still a Democrat. It’s just utterly bizarre. And I think part of the frenzy and vehemence comes from an extraordinary naivety about [government]. He actually doesn’t know anything about it, and he didn’t care about it until about 10 minutes ago.One thing that strikes me about Doge is how adversarial it is without it having to be. You could run a project like this, unleashing a roomful of 20-year-olds on the systems of government, without saying that everyone who works in federal government is a criminal. You could just ask: “How could the systems be made to work better?” Because $7tn [the approximate annual budget of the federal government] is quite a lot of money to spend and it’d be astonishing if there wasn’t some waste in there. But you could do it without making people frightened.And it worries me, because lots of things that happen in the US come back over the Atlantic. It happened with Reagan and Thatcher. It happened with Clinton providing the template for New Labour. So I suspect a version of this is going to come back over here.What lessons should the UK be taking from this? JL: Well, that’s one of them. If we were going to do what they call a zero-based review of government spending, let’s do it without framing them as the enemy, because it’s deeply unhelpful. Also, I wouldn’t be astonished if this attack on DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion in companies and organisations] came over. I think we should brace for impact on that one.For your essay, John, why did you decide to write about a number instead of a human being?JL: It’s partly intellectual vanity, but I really like the challenge in writing about structures and systems. We’re hardwired to like stories about people, but a lot of the most important stories in the world don’t have individual people as their central character. We’re very resistant to the idea that we don’t have agency as individuals.Your writing on economics arose from the research you did for your novel Capital, didn’t it?JL: Yeah, that’s right. I’d been following the financial crisis and ended up knowing a lot about it, so I wrote a nonfiction book [Whoops!] in order to quarantine that information, because one of the problems with research from the fiction point of view is that you end up having to use it. It’s very difficult to research a topic and then say: “You know what, that doesn’t really belong in the book.” But finance is difficult to dramatise because of the level of detail involved. It’s kind of anti-erotic in fiction to just explain things.Michael, in the other direction, have you ever come upon a story that didn’t quite work as reportage and you wished you had a novelist’s toolkit to turn it into fiction?ML: No, but I have had moments where I thought: “This story is not mine because I’m just not equipped to write it.” And I wrote one of them – a book about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, the two Israeli psychologists [2016’s The Undoing Project]. I had that story land in my lap, with privileged access, and I spent eight years arguing with myself [about whether] I was the person to do it. I was sure that someone else better equipped – a subject-matter specialist – would come along and write the book. Then the people I had interviewed started dying off and I realised that no one was.JL: With quite a lot of these stories, the subject-matter expert is precisely the person who can’t tell the story.ML: That’s right. They don’t have the childlike wonder about it all. They don’t ask the simple questions. because they’re too deep in it … But no, I’ve never been frustrated by my lack of novelistic flair, and I never had a strong desire to write a novel. My literary frustration is all in screenwriting. I’ve had a very successful career as a failed screenwriter. I’ve been paid over and over to do these things, and they never got made.The world of screenwriting is a profound mystery, because you see all the shit they make. What’s the process? You’re turning down these things and making that? I worked on an adaptation of my last novel, The Wall, but then Apple said: “Really sorry, we have a competing project.” The competing project was called Extrapolations and I’ll give you a cash prize if you can get through a single episode. They spent tens and tens of millions on it. And it’s off-the-scale, unbelievably, face-meltingly bad.One problem for writers now is that there’s just such a blizzard of extraordinary news. How do you get a foothold and decide what to write about?JL: Perhaps this is more a matter of temperament than anything else, but I’m feeling that I have to step back a bit until it’s clear what the shape of it is, because my hunch would be some form of horrific implosion and the wheels falling off and chaos ensuing. But I thought that last time that Trump was president.ML: I’m going to Washington for much of April, and I have a character in mind, but I want to test it. It’s kind of a dark, funny book that I want to write, and I’ve got to see if this character can sustain that. Generally, I’m with John in that I like to wait and see. I feel like my role in the war is sniper. Don’t give away your position. You’re going to get one shot at this. Wait until you get the clean shot and take it. But I don’t think we’re far away from having the clean shot.JL: Given that you were on to [the possibility of Trump getting re-elected and gutting the federal government] when we spoke 18 months ago, Michael, are you surprised by how this has played out? Is it basically what you imagined, or is it weirder, more extreme?ML: I’d never have predicted this. I know Trump said that he could go out on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and the supporters would still be with him …JL: I believe that.ML: But I didn’t think he’d do what he’s doing materially to his own base. I mean, two days ago he partially gutted the veterans’ healthcare system. This is the healthcare system in a lot of the rural US. That’s his base. And who would have predicted the alliance with Musk? Not me. I would have thought they’d have a falling out after three days, that there just isn’t enough oxygen in the room for both of them. If you’re looking for the simplest explanation for what’s going on, if Trump was a Russian asset, I don’t know if he’d behave any differently from how he’s behaving. I’m not saying he is, but it isn’t the behaviour of someone who is maximising his political future – it’s someone who’s maximising the damage to society. And why would you do that? He was supposed to get rid of illegal immigrants, stop inflation, cut taxes, whatever. But [gutting the civil service] has become the central feature of his administration. I just didn’t think he cared that much about it.View image in fullscreenWhich is the real Bezos; the one who was supportive of this series celebrating public service or the one who’s now dedicating the Washington Post’s opinion pages to championing free markets?ML: I feel some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. He’s fun to talk to. He seems to be basically sane. He’s not obviously megalomaniacal or even that self-absorbed. He’s really interested in the world around him. He makes sense on a lot of subjects. So I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.But he’s done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn, that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing, like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.JL: How fucking craven do you have to be, if you can lose 99% of your net worth and still be worth $2bn and you can’t say “fuck you” to proto-fascists? The thing that is frightening is that people like him, men like him, are looking into the future and basically assuming that the US is going to become a kind of fascist state. Because, I mean, $2bn is enough to say “fuck you”. But if the US is now going to become a Maga [Make America Great Again] theocracy, and we just had the last election we’re ever going to have, then maybe he’s positioning for that. I don’t know that to be true, but that’s my darkest version.Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service, edited by Michael Lewis, is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply More

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      Musk’s entitlement remarks show Trumpworld can’t keep its story straight | Austin Sarat

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      The Trump administration is setting records and shattering norms in many ways, including in its almost daily policy flip-flops and rhetorical missteps. The latest started on Monday, when Elon Musk torched Trumpism by trumpeting the need to make cuts in federal entitlement programs.He did not clearly say whether or how those cuts would affect Medicaid, Medicare and social security benefits. But he was clear that those programs will be on his target list.Entitlements are “the big one to eliminate,” he told Larry Kudlow, an economic adviser during Donald Trump’s first term, on Fox Business Network. “Maybe half a trillion or $600, $700bn a year.”Throughout the 2024 campaign, the president promised not to cut social security and Medicare benefits. Even so, Musk appeared to tee up changes to those programs.He called entitlements “a mechanism by which the Democrats attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here and then turning them into voters”.“That’s why,” he continued, “Democrats are so upset about this situation. If we turn off this gigantic money magnet for illegal immigrants, then they will leave and they will lose voters.”As the AP notes in its report on the Musk-Kudlow interview: “The allegation echoed the ‘great replacement’ theory which claims that politicians are trying to expand their power by reshaping the country’s racial demographics.” Pinning the blame for entitlement cuts on undocumented immigrants is a Trumpist way of stoking the base, even as Musk lays the groundwork for making the lives of many Maga loyalists more difficult.The red meat Musk tossed to hardcore, anti-immigrant voters will not long be satisfactory if he follows through on cuts to programs on which many of them depend. In addition, Musk’s musings about entitlements will drive home the widening split between its plutocratic and populist wings.Last month, Steve Bannon, representing the populist wing of the Maga movement, gave a taste of what is to come in Trumpland when he warned that Republicans making cuts to Medicaid would affect members of Trump’s fan club.As the New Republic puts it: “On the Thursday episode of War Room, while gushing over massive government spending cuts, Bannon warned that cutting Medicaid specifically would prove unpopular among the working-class members of Trump’s base, who make up some of the 80 million people who get their healthcare through that program.”“Medicaid,” Bannon warned, “you got to be careful, because a lot of Maga’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong. Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.”And it is not just Medicaid that has strong support. Polls have “consistently shown that the American public strongly supports social security, across party and demographic lines”, per the National Academy of Social Insurance.A 2024 survey found “87 percent of Americans agree that social security should remain a priority for the nation no matter the state of budget deficits, and this support holds strong across party affiliation. Ninety per cent of Democrats, 86% of Republicans, and 88% of independents support keeping social security a priority.”In the wake of the November election, a Pew survey reported: “Republicans and Democrats have long differed over the size and scope of government, and that continued that continued in this election cycle.” But “large majorities of Trump (77%) and Harris supporters (83%) opposed any reductions in the social security program.”The president prepared the way for Musk’s remarks during his recent address to Congress when he delivered a litany of false claims about people receiving social security benefits well beyond anyone’s capacity to live. Musk followed suit with what he said about undocumented immigrants getting federal entitlement benefits.The fact is that if they work, they pay into the social security system, but they are not eligible to receive benefits. As KFF, a health policy research, polling and news organization, explains: “Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in federally funded coverage including Medicaid, Chip, or Medicare.”We got a glimpse of the trouble that Musk caused in Magaworld when, the day after his remarks, the White House tried to clean up the mess. It issued a press release saying: “The Trump administration will not cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits. President Trump himself has said it (over and over and over again).”Then, never missing a chance to bash the media, the White House insisted: “Elon Musk didn’t say that, either. The press is lying again.” The press release also insisted that Musk was only talking about plans to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.The Musk-led assault on the federal government may talk a lot about doing so, but that is a cover for a bigger project. As professor Jack Schneider observes: “We all know that there are ways our government could become more efficient or more effective. But this project isn’t really about trimming the fat – it’s about cutting you loose.”The Trump-Musk project is also designed to cripple government agencies, deprive government of the funds it needs to deliver necessary services, and further erode the public’s trust in government.That is why Musk has not been shy about denigrating the entire social security system, calling it a “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all times”. The White House effort to whitewash Musk’s faux pas is another example of the continuing saga of its baffling inability to get its story straight.The president may think that he gets more than he loses from his “billionaire in a china-shop” sidekick. But, in the end, while Trump may survive his association with the Musk, Trumpism may not.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 hundred books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Trump administration asks supreme court to uphold order curtailing birthright citizenship – live

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      The Trump administration has appealed to the supreme court to uphold the president’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship, Reuters reports.Donald Trump signed the order shortly after taking office, but multiple federal judges have ruled against it in lawsuits filed by rights groups. Here’s more on the appeal, from Reuters:
      The Justice Department made the request challenging the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued against Trump’s order by federal courts in Washington state, Massachusetts and Maryland.
      The administration said the injunctions should be scaled back from applying universally and limited to just the plaintiffs that brought the cases and are “actually within the courts’ power.”
      “Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the Justice Department said in the filing. “This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
      Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in office on January 20, directed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of U.S.-born children who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident.
      The order was intended to apply starting February 19, but has been blocked nationwide by multiple federal judges.
      As our colleagues Anna Betts and Erum Salam reported on Wednesday, a government charging document addressed to Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident and green card holder who is currently being held in a Louisiana detention center, said that secretary of state Marco Rubio “has reasonable ground to believe that your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.The phrase “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” is a direct reference to a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives the secretary of state the power to expel non-citizens deemed to be a threat.As the New York Times reported this week, in 1996, when the Clinton administration tried to use this provision to deport a former Mexican government official, a federal judge ruled that this section of the law was “void for vagueness”, deprived the non-citizen of “the due process right to a meaningful opportunity to be heard”, and was “an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power”.That judge was Maryanne Trump Barry, the president’s eldest sister, who was nominated to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan in 1983, elevated to an appeals court by Bill Clinton, and passed away in 2023.Although a three-judge appeals court panel later overturned her ruling on procedural grounds, in an opinion written by then-Circuit Judge Samuel Alito, the forceful language of her opinion still resonates with the arguments of Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyers:“Make no mistake about it. This case is about the Constitution of the United States and the panoply of protections that document provides to the citizens of this country and those non-citizens who are here legally and, thus, here as our guests”, Judge Barry wrote. “The issue before the court is not whether plaintiff has the right to remain in this country beyond the period for which he was lawfully admitted…[t]he issue, rather, is whether an alien who is in this country legally can, merely because he is here, have his liberty restrained and be forcibly removed to a specific country in the unfettered discretion of the Secretary of State and without any meaningful opportunity to be heard. The answer is a ringing ‘no’”.Corks were not popping on Wall Street on Thursday, as stocks plunged again following Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 200% tariff “on all wines, Champagnes, and alcoholic products” from European Union countries if the trading bloc makes good on its threat to retaliate for steel and aluminum tariffs announced by the US president by adding a 50% tariff on American products, including Kentucky bourbon.The sharp drop in the S&P 500 meant that a the index is now in “a correction” — a term used when when stocks falls 10 percent or more from their peak.While the Wall Street Journal blamed the drop on “investors on edge over new tariff threats”, pro-Trump media outlets further to the right, like Newsmax, sought to play down the president’s role in the plunging markets. “This correction is overdue”, a guest on the far-right network assured viewers on Thursday. “Nothing to do with Trump. Nothing to do with tariffs”.As the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy noted in a podcast interview this week, the downturn began in the middle of February “when it became clear that Tump was serious about these tariffs, a lot of people on Wall Street thought he was bluffing”.Cassidy went on to explain that Trump appears to be wedded to a dream of undoing globalization and returning to a period in the 19th century when the United States was closer to being an autarky, a self-sufficient country, closed off from the rest of the world.That seems to jibe with Trump’s claim, in his announcement of the 200% tariff on Champagne, a form of sparkling wine that is only produced in the Champagne region of France, “This will be great for the Wine and Champagne businesses in the US”.The Trump administration has appealed to the supreme court to uphold the president’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship, Reuters reports.Donald Trump signed the order shortly after taking office, but multiple federal judges have ruled against it in lawsuits filed by rights groups. Here’s more on the appeal, from Reuters:
      The Justice Department made the request challenging the scope of three nationwide injunctions issued against Trump’s order by federal courts in Washington state, Massachusetts and Maryland.
      The administration said the injunctions should be scaled back from applying universally and limited to just the plaintiffs that brought the cases and are “actually within the courts’ power.”
      “Universal injunctions have reached epidemic proportions since the start of the current administration,” the Justice Department said in the filing. “This court should declare that enough is enough before district courts’ burgeoning reliance on universal injunctions becomes further entrenched.”
      Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in office on January 20, directed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of U.S.-born children who do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident.
      The order was intended to apply starting February 19, but has been blocked nationwide by multiple federal judges.
      The US Postal Service will reduce its staff by 10,000 through early retirements, and has signed an agreement with Elon Musk’s department of government efficiency (Doge) to streamline its operations, postmaster general Louis DeJoy announced.USPS aims to reduce its workforce in 30 days, DeJoy said in a letter addressed to leaders of Congress – a much faster timeline than the 30,000 positions it reduced from fiscal year 2021.The postmaster added that Doge would help USPS “in identifying and achieving further efficiencies”.“This is an effort aligned with our efforts, as while we have accomplished a great deal, there is much more to be done. We are happy to have others to assist us in our worthwhile cause. The DOGE team was gracious enough to ask for the big problems they can help us with,” DeJoy said.A dozen national Jewish organizations are condemning the Trump administration for detaining and attempting to deport Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil under the pretense of fighting antisemitism.“Arresting and/or deporting people because of their political views goes against the very foundation of our national identity and is profoundly un-American,” the groups wrote in a letter to homeland security secretary Kristi Noem today.The organizations, including J Street and T’ruah, warned that using antisemitism as justification for suppressing political dissent threatens both Jewish safety and democracy in the United States.The coalition are urging the administration to ensure Khalil receives due process and to stop “co-opting the fight against antisemitism” in ways that endanger vulnerable communities.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt hit back at the federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of federal workers fired during their probationary terms, saying they overstepped their bounds.Leavitt added that the administration would appeal the decision. Here’s her statement:
      A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the Executive Branch. The President has the authority to exercise the power of the entire executive branch – singular district court judges cannot abuse the power of the entire judiciary to thwart the President’s agenda. If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for President themselves. The Trump Administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order.
      Several Senate Democrats have announced their determination to block passage of a measure approved by House Republicans earlier this week to keep the government funded through September and prevent a shutdown that will begin after Friday.It’s a significant move, as it raises the possibility that funding will lapse after midnight on Saturday, potentially handing Donald Trump the ability to further undermine the federal government’s operations. But several Democratic senators say it’s a fight worth having.Mark Kelly of swing state Arizona said:
      I cannot vote for the Republican plan to give unchecked power to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
      I told Arizonans I’d stand up when it was right for our state and our country, and this is one of those moments.
      Fellow Arizonan Ruben Gallego said much the same (it’s worth noting neither man is up for election next year):
      This is a bad resolution that gives Elon Musk and his cronies permission to continue cutting veterans’ benefits, slashes resources for Arizona’s water needs, and abandons our wildland firefighters.
      Newly arrived New Jersey senator Andy Kim is against it:
      Republicans have made it so Musk and the most powerful win and everyone else loses. I don’t want a shutdown but I can’t vote for this overreach of power, giving Trump and Musk unchecked power to line their pockets. I’m a NO on the CR.
      So is Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich, both of New Mexico:
      We want to see the federal government funded and functional, and we have been fighting every day to force this administration to put the chainsaw down when it comes to the healthcare, education, and VA benefits our communities depend on.
      But we won’t stand by as Republicans try to shove through this power grab masquerading as a funding bill. For the people of New Mexico, we will vote ‘no’ on Republicans’ continuing resolution.
      The GOP controls the Senate but will need at least some Democratic support to get the spending bill through. Despite this opposition, there is also a chance that enough Democrats will get on board with the bill for it to be enacted.Donald Trump’s order to release billions of gallons of water from California reservoirs is widely viewed in the state as a waste of water.Despite that, the president believes it helped Los Angeles deal with its risk of wildfires, a contention he just repeated, using some odd phrasing, in the Oval Office:
      I broke into Los Angeles. Can you believe it? I had a break in, I invaded Los Angeles, and we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down. They have so much water, they don’t know what to do. They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons, okay, can you believe it? And in the meantime, they lost 25,000 houses … Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.
      The facts tell a different story:On Greenland, Trump gets asked about his vision for potential annexation of the island.“Well, I think it will happen. I’m just thinking, I didn’t give it much thought before, but I’m sitting with a man that could be very instrumental,” he says, as he turns to Rutte saying “Mark, we need that for international security … as we have a lot of our favourite players, cruising around the coast.”Rutte distances himself from his comments on annexing Greenland, but says Trump is right talking about growing risks in the North Arctic.Trump is then asked about the recent elections in Greenland, and says “it was a good election for us.”“The person that did the best is a very good person as far as we are concerned, so we will be talking about it and it is very important,” he says.The president says the US “is going to order” 48 icebreakers, and that would help to strengthen US position “as that whole area is becoming very important.”“So we are going to have to make a deal on that and Denmark is not able to do that [offer protection],” he says.He then mocks Denmark saying they have “nothing to do with that” as “a boat landed there 200 years ago or something, and they say they have rights to it?” “I don’t know if that is true.”“We have been dealing with Denmark, we have been dealing with Greenland, and we have to do it,” he says.He again suggests Nato could be involved given its bases there, and says “maybe you’ll see more and more soldiers” there. He then asked defence secretary Pete Hegseth if he should send more troops there. “Don’t answer that Pete,” he laughs.Reporters took the opportunity to question Trump and whether he’s willing to let up on the tariffs he is levying on major trade partners like Canada.“No, we’ve been ripped off for years,” Trump said. “I’m not going to bend at all.”He went on to say that the country has nothing the US needs but added that he loves Canada and mentioned its contributions like former Canadian ice hockey player, Wayne Gretzky.You can follow our Europe live blog for more on Trump and Rutte’s comments happening now:The Trump-Rutte meeting is being held to discuss the costs of supporting Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia.Trump said hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent and “really wasted” on defense for Ukraine. He said: “It’s also a tremendous cost to the United States and other countries.” More

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      Judge orders Trump administration to reinstate most fired probationary staff

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      A federal judge in California granted a preliminary injunction to reinstate thousands of fired probationary workers at federal agencies as part of a lawsuit filed by the American Federation of Government Employees.The ruling by the judge William H Alsup in the US district court for the northern district of California applies to fired probationary employees at the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior and the Department of the Treasury.At least 30,000 probationary employees working for the federal government have been fired as part of the efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” to slash the federal workforce and government expenditures.Many of the employees were fired with the cited reason being poor performance, though workers have disputed this based on positive performance evaluations.Alsup said it was a “lie” that the probationary workers who were fired had performance issues.“It is sad, a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said in court on Thursday.The judge also forbade the office of personnel management from providing any guidance to federal agencies on which employees should be terminated. Alsup authorized depositions and ordered further briefing on whether the administrative channel for fired workers to appeal their terminations is available or has been destroyed due to firings at the appeals board and office of special counsel personnel.“[The] AFGE is pleased with Judge Alsup’s order to immediately reinstate tens of thousands of probationary federal employees who were illegally fired from their jobs by an administration hellbent on crippling federal agencies and their work on behalf of the American public,” Everett Kelley, national president of the union said in a statement.“We are grateful for these employees and the critical work they do, and AFGE will keep fighting until all federal employees who were unjustly and illegally fired are given their jobs back.”The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that the judge overstepped his bounds.“A single judge is attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the executive branch,” she said, adding: “The Trump administration will immediately fight back against this absurd and unconstitutional order.”Before the judge’s order, the US Department of Justice had declined to make the acting head of the office of personnel management, Charles Ezell, available to testify on the firings in court.In an earlier ruling, Alsup said on 27 February that the firing of probationary employees was illegal because the office of personnel management had no authority to order it.The OPM updated the 20 January memo on probationary employees, which the American Federation of Government Employees argued reveals an admission it unlawfully directed the firings.“OPM’s revision of its Jan 20 memo is a clear admission that it unlawfully directed federal agencies to carry out mass terminations of probationary employees – which aligns with Judge Alsup’s recent decision in our lawsuit challenging these illegal firings,” the union said in a statement earlier this month. “Every agency should immediately rescind these unlawful terminations and reinstate everyone who was illegally fired.” More

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      Trump administration briefing: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention, ‘Trumpcession’ fears and gutting USAid

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      The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union warned on Monday.“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the US and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate.”Outrage after Palestinian student activist detainedFree speech organizations and advocates are expressing outrage after a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was arrested and detained over the weekend. Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities, who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.Read the full storyArrest of Palestinian activist first of ‘many to come’, Trump saysDonald Trump said on Monday that the arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, is the “first arrest of many to come”.Read the full storyUS stocks register heavy falls as White House tries to talk up Trump tariffsThe US stock market continued to drop on Monday as the White House denied that Donald Trump’s trade policies were causing lasting chaos within the economy.The S&P 500 fell 2.7%, the Dow Jones dropped 2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 4% as investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Tesla’s shares had their worst day since September 2020, falling 15%.Read the full storyRisk of ‘Trumpcession’ rising, economists say, as global markets fallThe risk that the US economy will enter recession this year is rising, according to economists, as Donald Trump’s chaotic approach to tariffs continued to hit markets.Read the full storyTrump tariffs policy ‘misguided’ and US economy ‘very wobbly’, ex-adviser saysDonald Trump’s focus on tariffs as an economic weapon is “misguided”, and the US economy is “very wobbly”, a former adviser and longtime supporter of the president said.Read the full storyOntario sets 25% surcharge on US energy exportsThe Canadian province of Ontario is imposing a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to the states of New York, Michigan and Minnesota in protest against Donald Trump’s tariffs, Premier Doug Ford said on Monday.Read the full storyCanada’s designated PM Mark Carney meets Trudeau as Trump threat loomsCanada’s incoming prime minister, Mark Carney, has met with Justin Trudeau as the pair discuss a transfer of power after the former central banker’s landslide victory at the Liberal party’s leadership race.The meeting on Monday sets the stage for an imminent federal election and gives Canada a fresh leader to square off against the US president, with the two countries locked in a bitter trade war provoked by Donald Trump.Read the full storyUS rebrands immigration app to CBP Home with ‘self-deport’ functionOn day one of his presidency, Donald Trump, issued a directive abruptly ending the government’s use of CBP One – an online application that had served as the primary means for people at the southern border to apply for asylum in the US. On Monday, the administration announced it has reimagined the app as a platform for “self-deportation”.Read the full story83% of USAid programs terminated after purgeThe Trump administration has finished a six-week purge of programs of the US Agency for International Development, cutting 83% of its programs, according to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.Read the full storyTop Washington Post columnist quits after piece critical of Bezos is scrappedWashington Post associate editor and top political columnist Ruth Marcus is reportedly resigning after the decision by the CEO, Will Lewis, to kill her opinion column critical of the billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’s latest changes to the paper.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      There is “no military solution” to the conflict in Ukraine, US secretary of state Marco Rubio has said ahead of high-stakes meetings on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia aimed at repairing a severely damaged relationship that has left embattled Kyiv without Washington’s support.

      JD Vance’s first cousin has called the vice-president and Donald Trump “useful idiots” to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

      A man pardoned by Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection who also was convicted of plotting to kill federal agents investigating him is still legally liable for the plot, a judge ruled on Monday.

      The US secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has directed the Food and Drug Administration to revise safety rules to help eliminate a provision that allows companies to self-affirm that food ingredients are safe. The move would increase transparency for consumers as well as the FDA’s oversight of food ingredients considered to be safe, Kennedy said on Monday.

      Poland’s prime minister called on “friends” to respect their allies in a post on X that mentioned nobody by name but came a day after an extraordinary social media spat between top officials in the US and Poland over Starlink satellites.

      A Virginia man who was detained by Ice agents despite being an American citizen says he is reconsidering his support for Trump.

      Wall Street fell significantly as traders grew concerned over the possibility that Trump’s trade war will send the US economy into a recession.

      A top state department official has a history of insulting his boss, Marco Rubio, in social media posts, among many other questionable statements. More

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      ACLU warns pro-Palestinian activist’s arrest meant ‘to intimidate and chill speech’ – live

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      The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union warned.“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the U.S. and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate. The government must immediately return Mr Khalil to New York, release him back to his family and reverse course on this discriminatory policy.”House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries rejected Republicans’ go-it-alone strategy to avert a government shutdown, saying Democrats would not back their plan to fund federal agencies through the rest of the fiscal year.“It is not something we could ever support,” Jeffries told reporters on Capitol Hill. “House Democrats will not be complicit in the Republican effort to hurt the American people.”“The House Republican so-called spending bill does nothing to protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Quite the opposite,” he said, adding that the bill would “quite dramatically” cut health benefits and nutritional assistance programs for children and American families.Jeffries did not take questions and it remains unclear whether any House Democrats will support the GOP spending bill, which could come up for a vote as early as Tuesday. House Republicans hold a wafer-thin majority and can only afford to lose a handful of votes in order to pass the measure.Congress must act by midnight on Friday to avoid a partial government shutdown.Los Angeles district attorney Nathan Hochman says that he opposes the resentencing of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were convicted for the 1989 killing of their parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. In a press release on Monday, Hochman’s office said that after reviewing thousands of pages of records and transcripts and hundreds of hours of video, he found that the brothers lied during their testimony and tried to get others to lie on their behalf.
      As a full examination of the record reveals, the Menendez brothers have never come clean and admitted that they lied about their self-defense…“The Court must consider such lack of full insight and lack of acceptance of responsibility for their murderous actions in deciding whether the Menendez brothers pose an unreasonable risk of danger to the community,” Hochman said in a statement.
      The brothers were sentenced for the killings in 1996 and sentenced to life sentences without the possibility of parole.Read the rest of Hochman’s rationale here.Protests are underway in New York following the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year. Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card who is a recent Columbia graduate, was arrested over the weekend by immigration authorities.Today’s final numbers from Wall Street are out and the three main indices have continued to drop. The S&P 500 fell 2.7%, the Dow Jones dropped 2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 4% as investors sold shares in the so-called “magnificent seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla. Tesla’s shares had their worst day since September 2020, falling 15%.The fall came a day after Trump skirted around questions about a potential recession on Sunday. Asked if he expected a recession, Trump said: “There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big … It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us.”Kevin Hassett, the head of the national economic council, told CNBC on Monday that any uncertainty around Trump’s trade policies would be resolved by early April and that the policies were “creating jobs in the US”.We’re about 10 minutes away from the market’s close and things are not looking good on Wall Street.Traders have been rattled for days by fears that Donald Trump’s tariffs against China, Canada and Mexico, and vow to impose “reciprocal” levies against countries worldwide next month, will send the US economy into recession.The terror has been particularly bad today, leading to steep sell offs in the three main indices. The broad-based S&P 500 is currently down 2.5%, while the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost 1.9%. Over at the tech-heavy Nasdaq, the bleeding has resulted in a 4% loss.Needless to say, this is not what a president who touts the stock market as a barometer of their economic success would like to see.National intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard has announced that she has revoked the security clearances of several former members of Joe Biden’s administration, as well as critics of Donald Trump.“Per @POTUS directive, I have revoked security clearances and barred access to classified information for Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lisa Monaco, Mark Zaid, Norman Eisen, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Andrew Weissman, along with the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden ‘disinformation’ letter. The President’s Daily Brief is no longer being provided to former President Biden,” Gabbard wrote on X.The decision to revoke the security clearance of Blinken, the former secretary of state, appears to have been announced last month. Trump earlier withdrew the clearances of Biden and former joint chiefs of staff chairman Mark Milley.Beyond the Biden administration, Gabbard targeted James, who has pursued a civil fraud suit against the Trump Organization, and Manhattan district attorney Bragg, who successfully prosecuted the president on felony business fraud charges.A former top social security administration official accused Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” of lying about alleged fraud discovered in the agency, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:A former chief of staff at the US Social Security Administration (SSA) described how agents of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – Elon Musk’s government cost-cutting operation – were imposed on the agency, assailing senior staff with questions “based on the general myth of supposed widespread fraud” and acting with dangerous disregard for data confidentiality.In a declaration filed with a lawsuit on Friday and referring to the Doge agents Mike Russo and Akash Bobba, Tiffany Flick said: “We proposed briefings to help Mr Russo and Mr Bobba understand the many measures the agency takes to help ensure the accuracy of benefit payments, including those measures that help ensure we are not paying benefits to deceased individuals.“However, Mr Russo seemed completely focused on questions … based on the general myth of supposed widespread social security fraud, rather than facts.”Flick also said she was “not confident” Doge agents had “the requisite knowledge and training to prevent sensitive information from being inadvertently transferred to bad actors”, given its agents have “never been vetted by SSA or trained on SSA data, systems or programs”.“In such a chaotic environment, the risk of data leaking into the wrong hands is significant,” Flick said.The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union warned.“This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.“The federal government is claiming the authority to deport people with deep ties to the U.S. and revoke their green cards for advocating positions that the government opposes. To be clear: the first amendment protects everyone in the US. The government’s actions are obviously intended to intimidate and chill speech on one side of a public debate. The government must immediately return Mr Khalil to New York, release him back to his family and reverse course on this discriminatory policy.”Activists were arrested while disrupting the CERAWeek fossil fuel conference on Monday, chanting “people over profit”.The protesters blocked the street outside the conference hotel in Houston, where energy secretary Chris Wright and top brass from energy companies including Shell and Exxon spoke on Monday.Among those arrested was local organizer Yvette Arellano of Texas environmental justice group Fenceline Watch.“Human rights, not sacrifice,” she chanted as the police escorted her away.As the CERAWeek oil and gas conference convened fossil fuel bigwigs in Houston on Monday, hundreds of activists staged a protest down the street.“We need clean air, not another billionaire,” they chanted.Among the featured speakers at the rally was Yvette Arellano, founder and director of Fenceline Watch, a Houston-based environmental justice organization. Last year, she was barred from attending CERAWeek despite raising $8,500 for a ticket.“Unfettered” fossil fuel expansion, she said, is taking a toll on the climate while polluting vulnerable communities in Texas and beyond.“It’s our communities that are being harmed,” she said.Other activists hail from communities as far flung as Appalachia and the Standing Rock Indigenous reservation in North Dakota.A story to watch this week is Congress’s scramble to pass spending legislation and avert a shutdown that will begin Friday at midnight. These things often come down to the wire, but the Guardian’s Joseph Gedeon reports that Donald Trump is on board with the House GOP’s proposal to keep the government open. Whether enough of their lawmakers are remains to be seen:Republican lawmakers are scrambling to avert a government shutdown set to begin on Saturday, with Donald Trump’s backing for a temporary funding measure having suddenly silenced the usual conservative opposition.The stopgap funding bill, known as a continuing resolution (CR), would maintain government operations at current funding levels through 30 September, the end of the fiscal year. Republican US House speaker Mike Johnson said he plans to hold a procedural vote on Monday, aiming for a passage vote on Tuesday before sending lawmakers home for recess.Trump instructed reluctant fellow Republicans to fall in line behind the stopgap bill that would fund the government through September. “All Republicans should vote (Please!) YES next week,” the president wrote on Saturday on his Truth Social platform.Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian American senior at Columbia who has protested alongside Mahmoud Khalil, told Reuters she was “horrified for my dear friend Mahmoud, who is a legal resident, and I am horrified that this is only the beginning”.Columbia issued a revised protocol for how students and school staff should deal with federal immigration agents seeking to enter private school property, Reuters reports, saying they could enter without a judicial arrest warrant in “exigent circumstances”, which it did not specify.“By allowing ICE on campus, Columbia is surrendering to the Trump administration’s assault on universities across the country and sacrificing international students to protect its finances,” the Student Workers of Columbia said in a statement.The move to arrest and detain Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil comes after the Trump administration announced last week that it would revoke about $400m in federal grants and contracts from Columbia University.The Trump administration alleges that the university has not done enough to stop antisemitism on campus.“Universities must comply with all federal antidiscrimination laws if they are going to receive federal funding. For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,” education secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement on Friday.Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring, the Associated Press reported Sunday.The Trump administration has claimed participants forfeited their rights to remain in the country by supporting Hamas.Before Trump addressed Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, free speech organizations and advocates are expressing outrage over his detention over the weekend.Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was taken into custody by federal immigration authorities on Saturday night, who reportedly said that they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.Read the full story:In a post on Truth Social, president Donald Trump confirmed the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent Palestinian activist and permanent US resident with a green card.“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump said.The president said Ice took Khalil, who led protests at Columbia University during his time as a student there, into custody after his executive order and claimed, without evidence, that similar activists on college campuses are paid agitators, not students.Here’s the text of Trump’s full post:
      Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it. Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply. Thank you!
      Ontario premier Doug Ford announced a 25% tax on exports of electricity to New York, Minnesota and Michigan in retaliation for the tariffs Donald Trump imposed on Canada last week, the Associated Press reports.Trump has since exempted many Canadian products from the 25% levies, but Ford refused to back down and warned he may increase the surcharge or even cut off electricity exports entirely if the United States escalates its tariffs.Here’s more, from the AP:
      “I will not hesitate to increase this charge. If the United State escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference in Toronto.
      “Believe me when I say I do not want to do this. I feel terrible for the American people who didn’t start this trade war. It’s one person who is responsible, it’s President Trump.”
      Ford said Ontario’s tariff would remain in place despite the one-month reprieve from Trump, noting a one-month pause means nothing but more uncertainty. Quebec is also considering taking similar measures with electricity exports to the U.S.
      Ford’s office said the new market rules require any generator selling electricity to the U.S. to add a 25% surcharge. Ontario’s government expects it to generate revenue of $300,000 Canadian dollars ($208,000) to CA$400,000 ($277,000) per day, “which will be used to support Ontario workers, families and businesses.”
      The new surcharge is in addition to the federal government’s initial CA$30 billion ($21 billion) worth of retaliatory tariffs have been applied on items like American orange juice, peanut butter, coffee, appliances, footwear, cosmetics, motorcycles and certain pulp and paper products.
      Secretary of state Marco Rubio announced that USAid had cancelled the majority of its programs, while the rest will be folded into the state department. The decision was reportedly made early, and after many of the shuttered aid agency’s partners believed they had more time to request to preserve their programs. It was also met with approval from Elon Musk, after reports emerged last week that he squabbled with Rubio at a cabinet meeting attended by Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the arrest of pro-Palestinian activist and US green card holder Mahmoud Khalil by immigration agents has sparked concerns that the Trump administration is looking to retaliate against speech it does not approve of. The homeland security department said Khalil’s detention was in line with an executive order targeting “activities aligned to Hamas”.Here’s what else has happened today so far:

      Wall Street fell significantly as traders grew concerned over the possibility that Trump’s trade war will send the US economy into a recession.

      A top state department official has a history of insulting his boss in social media posts, among many other questionable statements.

      Trump will sign more executive orders at 3pm, though the White House did not say what they will concern. More

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      EPA issues guidance that spending of $50,000 or more must gain approval of Doge

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      The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued new guidance directing that spending items greater than $50,000 now require approval from Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), even as Donald Trump began putting some distance between Musk’s reach and the power of government department heads – at least over job cuts.“Any assistance agreement, contract or interagency agreement transaction [valued at] $50,000 or greater must receive approval from an EPA DOGE team member,” the EPA guidance says, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press. The EPA did not respond to a request from the news agency on Friday for comment.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate environment and public works committee, called the new directive “troubling”, adding that it means agency actions, including routine contracts and grant awards, “now face unnecessary bureaucratic delays”.Whitehouse added that the involvement of Musk’s “unvetted, inexperienced team raises serious concerns about improper external influence on specialized agency decision-making”.The latest development came after Donald Trump on Thursday gave a clear sign of admitting that drastic government cuts spearheaded by his ally Musk have gone too far. The US president’s views after an explosive, closed-door cabinet confrontation involving Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, exposed simmering anger over the billionaire entrepreneur’s key role, which Musk attended even though he is not a cabinet member.After weeks of turmoil in the federal bureaucracy wreaked by the Doge team, Trump issued a call for a “scalpel” rather than a “hatchet” to be applied to the task of reducing the federal bureaucracy.The president’s comment in a social media post followed a volatile encounter that saw Musk, the SpaceX and Tesla owner who has assumed a central role in Trump’s fledgling administration, face off against Rubio, whom he accused of “firing nobody”, according to the New York Times. Rubio, who had been furious over Musk’s role in shutting down the main US foreign assistance body, USAid – over which the secretary of state supposedly has control – hit back vigorously, according to the report.Thursday’s cabinet meeting was scheduled abruptly after howls of protest about the effects of Doge’s slashing of government agencies by the constituents of Republican members of Congress, including former military veterans, many of whom have been fired in a wave of indiscriminate cuts.“As the secretaries learn about, and understand, the people working for the various departments, they can be very precise as to who will remain, and who will go,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform.“We say the ‘scalpel’ rather than the ‘hatchet.’ The combination of them, Elon, Doge, and other great people will be able to do things at a historic level.”Trump’s public call for discretion came after he told cabinet secretaries that they rather than Musk had the final say over whom to hire and fire.Musk conveyed a similar message in a meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Thursday, claiming he was not to blame for the mass layoffs and giving them his phone number if they wanted to relay concerns.It contrasted starkly with the image he projected at last month’s CPAC conference, when he paraded on stage with a chainsaw to symbolise his ruthless approach to downsizing government agencies. He has openly boasted of feeding the now-gutted USAid “into the wood chipper”, while laying off its estimated 10,000-employee workforce.“Elon doesn’t fire people,” Richard Hudson, a Republican member of Congress from North Carolina, told reporters after a pizza dinner with Musk in the basement of the US Capitol on Thursday.“He doesn’t have hiring and firing authority. The president’s empowered him to go uncover this information, that’s it.”The attempt to downplay a role Musk in which has consistently sought the limelight follows questions from judges in the multiple court cases filed against Doge’s activities about who is leading the staff-culling crusade – and whether Musk himself has a direct role.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration has argued in legal filings that Musk, who has not been confirmed by Congress, is not the official head of Doge. But Trump undercut that in a prime-time address at the US Capitol on Tuesday by flatly suggesting that he is, a declaration that commentators said could directly affect pending court rulings.Numerous recently hired federal employees have been summarily fired before their probation period ended – when their posts would become harder to terminate because of legal protections.Carlos Gimenez, a Republican representative from Florida, said that the agencies rather than Musk had fired the probationers.“Some of the folks that were the probationary people, he didn’t fire them, they were actually supposedly fired by the agencies – and they messed up,” Gimenez said.The portrait of an impartial, hands-off Musk jarred with anecdotal on-the-ground evidence from agencies infiltrated by Doge operatives.On Thursday, federal marshals escorted members of Doge, along with Peter Marocco, director of the state department’s office of foreign assistance, into the Washington office of the US African Development Foundation (USADF), a day after staff had denied them access in what was seen as a David-versus-Goliath act of defiance by one of the smallest federal agencies.The entry resulted in a “traumatising scene”, employees told the Washington Post, and prompted a federal lawsuit by USADF’s president, Ward Brehm, challenging the authority of Trump, Marocco and Doge to close an agency that the president has deemed unnecessary.Further evidence of a de facto Doge takeover of government came in reports of its workers installing themselves in four separate rooms on the sixth floor of the General Service Administration’s building, “complete with beds from Ikea, lamps and dressers.”Politico said the agency was considering spending about $25,000 to install a washer and dryer on the premises, apparently to serve the resident Doge staff. Ethics experts warned that the arrangement could breach agency rules, the website reported.The Associated Press contributed reporting More