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    Trump threatens to raise Canadian steel and aluminum tariffs to 50%

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    The looming trade war between the US and Canada escalated on Tuesday as Donald Trump threatened to double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum after Canadian threats to increase electricity prices for US customers.On Tuesday morning Trump announced plans to double tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum from 25% to 50% and once again threatened to annex Canada as retaliation for the province of Ontario’s imposition of a 25% surcharge on electricity exports to several US states, in a dramatic escalation of the trade war between the two ostensibly allied countries.The news set off another stock market sell-off on Wall Street that was tempered when Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, said he made a deal with the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to suspend Canada’s 25% tariff on exports of electricity to Michigan, New York and Minnesota after Lutnick agreed to discuss renewing existing trade relations.Incorrectly calling Canada “one of the highest tariffing nations anywhere in the world”, Trump said he had instructed his secretary of commerce to increase levies on the metals due to start Wednesday morning. He also threatened more tariffs on 2 April on the car industry that would “essentially, permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada”.Asking rhetorically why the US received electricity from another country, he accused Canada of using energy, “that so affects the life of innocent people, as a bargaining chip and threat” and said “they will pay a financial price for this so big that it will be read about in History Books for many years to come”.After the news that Ontario was suspending its electricity hikes, Trump said he would “probably” reconsider imposing the higher tariffs on Canada.Mark Carney, Canada’s incoming prime minister, called Trump’s latest move “an attack on Canadian workers, families and businesses” and promised to “keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect and make credible, reliable commitments to free and fair trade”.The Trump administration was also reportedly preparing on Tuesday to institute a new rule that would require some Canadians staying in the US for more than 30 days to register personal information and agree to fingerprinting, according to Bloomberg. Currently there is largely frictionless travel for citizens between the two countries.The fractious economic battle between the US and Canada has developed even graver undertones as Trump makes increasingly aggressive threats for the US to absorb its northern neighbour. Although at first claiming that he wanted Canada to crack down on fentanyl, Trump has now accused the US ally of underpaying for military protection and incorrectly described the trade imbalance with Canada as a $200bn subsidy from the US.Trump coupled his tariff declaration with openly aggressive language about making Canada “our cherished Fifty First State”, repeating a constant refrain over the last few months. He claimed American statehood for Canada would make “all tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear”, called the border “an artificial line of separation drawn many years ago” and suggested the Canadian national anthem, O Canada, would become a state anthem.The rhetoric has inspired a rare unity among Canadian politicians, with Carney campaigning for Liberal leader on standing up to Trump, and saying to a standing ovation in his acceptance speech on Sunday that “Canada never, ever will be part of America”.Trump’s moves are just the latest in the chaos around the president’s trade policy, amid tumbling stock markets and fears it could trigger a possible US recession.The White House’s strategy so far has been to play down the anxiety on Wall Street, even as stocks waver. After Trump refused to rule out the possibility of a recession in an interview with Fox News over the weekend, the Nasdaq had its worst day on Monday since September 2022, dropping 4%.Shares in US automakers also fell after the announcement, as traders bet that high metal tariffs would drive up costs for the American industrial sector, eating into their profits. Ford Motor dropped nearly 4%, while General Motors dipped by 1.3%. Shares in the carmaker Stellantis – which has several manufacturing facilities in Canada – fell by more than 5%.Price premiums for aluminum on US physical market soared to a record high above $990 a metric ton, Reuters reported.The Ontario premier Ford has said that Trump must take the blame if there is a recession in the US, telling MSNBC on Tuesday: “If we go into a recession, it will be called the Trump recession.”Ford has said in the past that he would be willing to cut off US energy supply from Canada completely in response to Trump’s tariffs.“We will be relentless,” Ford said, adding he would not “hesitate” to shut off electricity exports to the US if Trump continues the trade war.“That’s the last thing I want to do. I want to send more electricity down to the US, to our closest allies or our best neighbors in the world. I want to send more electricity.” But, he said, “Is it a tool in our toolkit? One hundred per cent, and as he continues to hurt Canadian families, Ontario families, I won’t hesitate to do that.”Ford also encouraged American CEOs, who have been largely silent on the trade war and threats to Canadian sovereignty, to speak up. On Tuesday Trump is set to meet with the Business Roundtable, an influential group of business leaders that includes the CEOs of Google, Amazon and JPMorgan.Ford said: “We need those CEOs to actually get a backbone and stand in front of him and tell him, ‘This is going to be a disaster. It’s mass chaos right now.’”The group said in a statement last week that while it supported trade policies that “open markets to US exports, revitalize the domestic manufacturing base and de-risk supply chains”, it called on the White House to “preserve the benefits” of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which Trump himself signed in 2020 but has since apparently violated by suddenly imposing steep tariffs on both countries.Tariffs of 25% on steel and aluminum imports were already slated to apply to all countries globally on Wednesday, after Trump announced them last month.Both consumer and business confidence has dropped in the US since Trump entered office.A survey published on Monday in Chief Executive magazine found that CEOs’ rating of the current business climate fell 20% in January, from 6.3 out of 10 – with 1 being “poor” and 10 being “excellent” – to 5, the lowest since spring 2020.
    Meanwhile, consumer confidence measured by the Conference Board found that confidence dropped over 6% in February, its biggest month-to-month drop since August 2021.Trump had not yet spoken with Carney, said the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday, arguing that the tariffs on Canadian metals “was a retaliatory statement due to the escalation of rhetoric that we’ve seen out of Ontario, Canada”.“I think Canada is a neighbor. They are a partner. They have always been an ally,” she said, adding: “Perhaps they are becoming a competitor now.” More

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      Trump calls Tesla boycott ‘illegal’ and says he’s buying one to support Musk

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      Donald Trump said he intends to buy a “brand new Tesla” and blamed “Radical Left Lunatics” for “illegally” boycotting Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company a day after Tesla suffered its worst share price fall in nearly five years.On Tuesday, several Tesla vehicles were parked in the driveway of the White House for Trump to pick which vehicle to buy, accompanied by Musk and his young son. In August 2024, a podcaster gifted Trump a Cybertruck.“Elon Musk is ‘putting it on the line’ in order to help our Nation, and he is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! But the Radical Left Lunatics, as they often do, are trying to illegally and collusively boycott Tesla, one of the World’s great automakers, and Elon’s ‘baby,’ in order to attack and do harm to Elon, and everything he stands for,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday morning.Tesla’s shares fell hard on Monday as markets reacted to the threat of a recession and Trump’s tariff plans. Tesla’s slide came amid widespread protests over the billionaire Musk’s influence in the federal government at Tesla dealerships, a boycott campaign, car owners selling their Tesla vehicles, and activists pushing members of the public to sell Tesla shares.“In any event, I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American. Why should he be punished for putting his tremendous skills to work in order to help MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN???”Trump’s claim the boycott is “illegal” is false. The supreme court ruled in 1972 that the first amendment of the US constitution protects Americans’ right to protest against private businesses.View image in fullscreenMusk’s net worth decreased by $29bn yesterday alone, and has fallen by $132bn over the past 12 months, as Tesla shares’ gains have been wiped out. Tesla shares have declined every week since Trump took office, declining 15% on Monday alone. He remains the richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $320bn, according to Forbes.Tesla’s board members, including Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk, have offloaded millions of dollars worth of shares in recent months. Tesla vehicle sales abroad have also dropped significantly, including by 76.3% in Germany in February 2025 compared with February 2024.The boycott has emerged as Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government in a proclaimed effort to reduce federal spending. The access and actions by Musk and his team have incited concerns over the lack of transparency, false claims about cancelled contracts and grants and the amount of savings made.Polls have shown public support for Doge is mixed to unfavorable, with the vast majority of Democratic voters polling that Musk has too much power. More

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      Mahmoud Khalil’s treatment should not happen in a democracy | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      Forced disappearance, kidnapping, political imprisonment – take your pick. These terms all describe what has happened with the Trump administration’s first arrest for thought crimes, something that should never happen in a democracy.But it has, to Mahmoud Khalil, a recently graduated master’s student from Columbia University’s school of international and public affairs. And for each minute that Khalil is held in detention, every one of us should feel like our own individual rights in this country are being shredded. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is a barefaced attempt by the Trump administration to destroy free thinking while murdering due process and free speech along the way. This is an ominous development.On the evening of Saturday 8 March, Khalil, who is a lawful permanent resident of the US (a green card holder), and his US-citizen wife, who is eight months pregnant, were returning home to their Columbia University apartment in upper Manhattan. According to reports, the couple had just unlocked the door to the building when plainclothes agents from the Department of Homeland Security pushed their way in like thugs and demanded Khalil surrender himself for arrest.The lead agent told Khalil’s lawyer, whom Khalil had immediately called, that his student visa was being revoked. But Khalil doesn’t have a student visa for the very simple reason that he is a lawful permanent resident! Apparently confused, the agent next responded that Khalil’s green card was being revoked – which, by US law, cannot be done without a lot of due process. When pressed by Khalil’s lawyer to show a warrant for arrest, the agent simply hung up on the lawyer, shoved Khalil into handcuffs, and carted him away. As of this writing, Khalil is in a detention facility in Louisiana.Let’s be clear. If you grew up in Egypt or Nicaragua or Russia, you would recognize this behavior. If you have read the work of Milan Kundera or Ariel Dorfman or Breyten Breytenbach, you will recognize this behavior. This is how the authoritarian regimes always operate, seeking to demonize their critics and neutralize their opposition by lies, exaggerations and the blunt force of state power. This despicable and dangerous conduct has now come to the land of the free and the home of the brave as official policy.The Trump administration doesn’t even bother to disguise the ideological assault that characterizes Khalil’s arrest. Khalil was an active member of Columbia University’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, a war that has been characterized as a genocide by Israel by experts and multiple human rights organizations around the world. Khalil also served as a negotiator between the university administration and student activists who had set up an encampment on campus.It was in that role that Khalil’s profile grew, particularly among extreme rightwing organizations supporting Israel that began sending lists of students to the Trump administration who, they said, should be deported from the US because of their views. This blatant attempt to shut down free speech picked up after Donald Trump issued two executive orders in late January that called for deporting “perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment”. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the Trump administration is actively canceling every form of protection for other minority populations, while appearing deeply concerned about antisemitism, as it also tacitly supports antisemitic behavior.)Khalil had already suffered so much harassment by these pro-Israel groups that the day before his arrest, he wrote to the interim president of Columbia University, telling her that he was afraid that government officials or private actors would target him or his family, urging her to provide him legal support and protection. After his arrest, the official White House account on X issued a post that said: “Shalom, Mahmoud,” using a Hebrew word that can mean goodbye. Haha. Whoever wrote the post must think this very clever. But in a court of law, the post will only buttress the argument that Trump is on a rampage to shut down any types of speech he doesn’t like.Exactly which crime has Mahmoud Khalil committed? Which activities has he engaged in to warrant arrest and deportation? The best the Department of Homeland Security can come up with are the same flimsy innuendo that we hear over and over again. Any show of concern for Palestinians is, presto, turned into “activities aligned to Hamas”.That “aligned to Hamas” is not a legal standard is hardly surprising. It comes after all from the Trump administration, which operates almost definitionally as the opposite of a legal standard. Expecting something reasonable from this administration is like eating a razor-blade sandwich and thinking you won’t come out all bloodied, which is of course why the Trump administration is repeatedly offering you such aromatic and enticing fresh bread.I expect as much from Trump, but I demand more from Columbia University, my own alma mater. After Trump withdrew some $400m of federal funding over an unproven and completely ideologically driven allegation that Columbia was a hotbed of antisemitism, the interim president didn’t bother to defend her institution. Instead, she immediately sent us Columbia affiliates an email to “assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns”. I’m educated enough to know that the word “appeasement” has a specific history. I also know that cowards run away from Palestine, even if they too will be the ones who suffer in the end.I also demand more from my local officials. This federal assault on protected speech from a New Yorker should raise huge alarms from the mayor of New York, but all we’ve heard from Eric Adams thus far is … well, what sound would crickets make if they were flying business class on Turkish Airlines? If it’s any sound at all, I imagine the jet engine hums louder than the lack of objection he’s made. His silence is matched only by Andrew Cuomo, Adams’s new competition for the next New York mayoral race. Together, they might have enough courage to lose a game of chicken to the lion in the Wizard of Oz.But mostly, I demand a whole lot more from the Democratic party. Where is Hakeem Jeffries? Where is Chuck Schumer? They seem to believe the best way to defend free speech in this country is not to speak at all. Irrelevance has never been so recognizable.Democracy has always been a fragile, improvised, teetering wall of bricks that extends high in the air. It takes a lot of people to support it, but it gives quickly when faced with pressure from the other side. The thing is, even if you’re not supporting it, you’ll still get crushed when the wall falls. Too many people seem ready to be crushed. That’s only the tiniest reason to support Mahmoud Khalil. We all need to rush to the wall and do what we can to free him from his unjust imprisonment. For him and also for us. Because, you know what? He won’t be the last.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies

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      In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”.In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And last week, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing “department of governmental efficiency” and a man who has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, had become a father of 14.Republicans have long heralded the importance of “family values”. But in these developments, many see mounting signs of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trump’s incoherent coalition.‘Hipster eugenicists’In the US, interest in pronatalism has historically coincided with growing anxiety over changing gender norms and demographics, according to Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and the author of the book Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930. In the 1920s, pronatalism’s prominence grew after women gained the right to vote, as people worried about women working and wielding power outside the home.“When Theodore Roosevelt uses the term ‘race suicide’, he actually blames women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the right, white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Lovett said. “There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”Historically, US pronatalism was also tied to an interest in eugenics – and some of the more tech-minded, modern-day pronatalists do want to use breeding to fashion a better human race. Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four who have become standard-bearers for the burgeoning popularity of pronatalism among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have championed “no-holds-barred” medical research to engineer the “mass production of genetically selected humans”. They have joked to Business Insider about making business cards declaring themselves “hipster eugenicists” – although they have also rejected the idea that they are performing eugenics, stressing that they think racism is “so dumb” and that the only bloodlines they are altering are their own.The Collinses, who support Trump, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening their embryos for IQ, risk of depression and other markers. (Scientists aren’t convinced that it is possible to screen embryos for IQ.) These kinds of practices – which the Collins have called “polygenics” – draw a wedge between the Silicon Valley pronatalists who back Trump and his more traditional pronatalist supporters. The anti-abortion movement, which was critical to getting Trump elected in 2016, has long opposed IVF, largely because it can lead to unused or discarded embryos.In signing his pro-IVF executive order, Trump appears to be siding with the “tech right” (and the broader electorate, among which IVF remains extremely popular). When Musk recently brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the Oval Office, Trump called the four-year-old a “high-IQ individual”.View image in fullscreen‘Restructuring society’While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.“Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing – and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family,” said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. “The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.”In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stone’s frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox – a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization – pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen “family formation”, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.“Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. It’s a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important,” Stone said.Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: “No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.”Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform – in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within today’s Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.In practice, pronatalism – especially when paired with anti-abortion policy – often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a woman’s entire future.“This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers,” Gregory said. “Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it can’t be reduced to just a few soundbites.”Falling birth ratesBirth rates are, indeed, on the decline. To remain stable, populations must reproduce at a “replacement rate” of 2.1; in other words, each mother must have 2.1 babies. The US currently averages closer to 1.6. (South Korea, which maintains the world’s lowest fertility rate, had a rate of just 0.75 in 2024.)Experts are split over how to address this problem. The world’s population is at a record high, and immigration to rich countries could offset declines in fertility – but, as the medical journal the Lancet warned in a 2024 issue, “this approach will only work if there is a shift in current public and political attitudes towards immigration in many lower-fertility countries”. If countries remain hostile to immigration while their birth rates fall, they will probably end up with a shrunken labor force that is unable to support an ageing population.There is evidence that Americans would like to have more children. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans think an ideal family has one or two children, while only 2% said families should have zero. At the same time, a Pew poll that same year found that 47% of American adults under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children. Of those, nearly 60% say they just don’t want kids. Nearly 40% said they couldn’t afford to have kids or that the “state of the world” had convinced them not to.“We’re living in a moment where – I would say, unfortunately – marriage and parenthood have become ideologically polarized,” Wilcox said. More

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      Arrest of Palestinian student activist raises alarm about free speech – US politics live

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      US president Donald Trump on Tuesday said he will buy a new Tesla car to show support for the electric carmaker’s chief and his ally Elon Musk amid recent “Tesla Takedown” protests and the slump in the company’s stock price.Musk’s role in sweeping cuts to the federal workforce at the behest of Trump has led to protests in the US against Tesla, Reuters reported.About 350 demonstrators protested outside a Tesla electric vehicle dealership in Portland, Oregon, last week, while nine people were arrested during a raucous demonstration outside a New York City Tesla dealership earlier in March.Musk is spearheading the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump defended Musk by saying he was “putting it on the line” to help the country and was doing a “fantastic” job.“I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American,” Trump said.Musk thanked the president for his support on his own social media platform X.The World Health Organization has started a process of fixing new priorities and announced a one-year limit on staff contracts, an internal memo showed on Tuesday, as it aims to make the UN agency more sustainable after the US withdrawal.The memo, dated 10 March and signed by WHO’s Assistant Director-General Raul Thomas, laid out further cost-cutting measures – the latest in a series of such steps since US president Donald Trump’s announcement in January.Senior WHO officials have begun “prioritisation” work over the past three weeks to make the global health agency sustainable, the document says.“While operating in an extremely fluid environment, WHO’s senior management are working to navigate these shifting tides by undertaking a prioritisation process,” the memo said.“Their work will ensure that every resource is directed toward the most pressing priorities while preserving WHO’s ability to make a lasting impact,” it said.Good morning, and welcome to our US politics blog.The Trump administration’s decision to have immigration authorities arrest Mahmoud Khalil – a vocal critic of Israel’s war on Gaza – for alleged support of Hamas is an attack on free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union has warned.Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators.Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card, was reportedly detained at his Columbia apartment building in Manhattan in front of his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, on Saturday evening.The Trump administration has not said Khalil is accused of or charged with a crime, but Trump wrote that his presence in the US was “contrary to national and foreign policy interests.” The US president said Khalil’s arrest was the “first arrest of many to come”.The Department of Homeland Security accused the former student of “leading activities aligned to Hamas” but gave no details.“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.”This morning, a federal judge in New York City ordered that Khalil not be deported for now and set a court hearing in the case for Wednesday.The Education Department on Monday sent letters to 60 US universities, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and four University of California schools, warning them of cuts in federal funding unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus. More

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      Threaten campuses, shut down debate: that’s what free speech looks like under Trump | Owen Jones

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      For those who fear Donald Trump is a despot in the making, don’t worry: he has an answer. “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he triumphantly declared in his State of the Union address. “It’s back!” JD Vance scolded Europe in his speech at the Munich security conference last month, declaring that “free speech is in retreat” across the continent.Like all authoritarian creeds, Trumpism turns reality on its head and empties words of their meaning in an effort to sow confusion and disarray among its critics. On the same day Trump announced the revival of free speech in Congress, he posted on Truth Social that federal funding for educational institutions that allow “illegal protests” will be ceased. Notably, illegality was not defined, but the issue Trump is referring to, of course, is Palestine. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” he declared. “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”Trump’s first target: Columbia University, which has had $400m of federal funding slashed because of what the government says is “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. At least nine other campuses – including Harvard and the University of California – could be next. All were the sites of overwhelmingly peaceful encampments protesting over Israel’s genocidal attack against the Palestinian people. They weren’t simply opposing their government’s facilitation of this atrocity, through weapons, aid and diplomatic support, but demanding their colleges divest from companies linked to Israel.Just as Trumpism is no guarantor of free speech, nor is it a vanguard of anti-racism: it is, in fact, the opposite. The very real menace of antisemitism has been systematically conflated with any critique of crimes committed by the state of Israel. This is what is meant by “anti-Israel hate”, as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as new ambassador to the UN puts it, who became a rightwing icon after facing down university presidents over Israel. The president’s most powerful ally is Elon Musk, a man who in 2023 expressed his agreement with a tweet claiming Jewish communities were pushing “hatred against whites”, and recently performed Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.Trump himself declared that Jewish Americans who support the Democrats – that is, the vast majority – “hate their religion”, “hate everything about Israel” and “should be ashamed of themselves”, and menacingly said they would have a “lot” of blame if he lost the presidential election. The university protests, on the other hand, had a large Jewish presence, and hundreds of Jewish students signed a letter rejecting “the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic”.Indeed, Columbia in particular victimised its own students. The university banned Jewish Voice for Peace before the encampment began, ordered police raids which led to more than 100 students being arrested, disciplined and expelled, and targeted sympathetic academics.One was Katherine Franke, a professor who was publicly denounced by Stefanik and forced into retirement. Far from protecting Jewish students, Franke claims, this is about “radical advocates for Israel” lying about the campus protests. “This university has bent a knee and coddled bullies,” she says of Columbia’s repression of students’ free speech – and still it had its funding slashed.It gets more sinister. The Department of Homeland Security arrested one of the lead negotiators of Columbia’s encampment: Mahmoud Khalil, a US green card holder of Palestinian origin, married to a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. Unknown to his wife, he was sent more than 1,000 miles away to a notorious detention centre in Louisiana. The department’s claim: that “he led activities aligned to Hamas”, a blatant attempt to conflate Palestinian solidarity with the militant group responsible for war crimes on 7 October.Far from restoring free speech, Trump’s administration is incinerating the first amendment. When it comes to Palestine, free speech simply does not exist. Surely there is one man who will be particularly incensed by this outrage. After all, just last week he grandly proclaimed: “We have to ask ourselves the question as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say?’ If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t think you’re fit to lead Europe or the United States.” That was the vice-president, JD Vance.But the truth is, the US right never actually cared about free speech. It was simply a ruse, intended to stigmatise any attempt to rebut its bigotry against largely voiceless minorities. The Trump administration has escalated the biggest onslaught against free speech since McCarthyism: even before its assumption of power, those opposed to Israel’s genocide have faced being deplatformed, victimised and indeed targeted by institutions like Columbia.Yet it was not just the hardcore right who defamed these protests. Many self-described “liberals” and “centrists” joined in, smearing those opposed to some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century as hateful, dangerous extremists – Jewish Americans among them. In doing so, they helped legitimise the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that is now under way. Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of Jewish American campaign group IfNotNow, told me we are now seeing “the terrifying logical conclusion of smearing anyone calling for Palestinian freedom as an antisemite: a white nationalist administration carrying out its war on civil rights and free speech under the banner of ‘fighting antisemitism’. We are all endangered by this blatant assault on our democracy.”It would be deeply naive to believe this repression will end with the attacks on people expressing solidarity with Palestine. A precedent that is established can swiftly be expanded. As it is, the US media are increasingly menaced by – among other things – Trump’s libel actions, the threat of vexatious investigations and plutocrats like Jeff Bezos bending the knee to the would-be king. Free speech is being pummelled by those who claim to be its greatest advocates.

      Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Taoiseach must tread carefully amid tensions before Trump meeting

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      St Patrick’s Day has long been one of the sacred moments of the Irish-American calendar with more than 200 years of parades in New York and a shamrock reception at the White House launched by Dwight Eisenhower in 1953 to cement political ties between the two nations.But this year’s annual meeting between the taoiseach and the US president, a week early because of a congressional recess on 17 March, is laden with anxiety over the future of Ireland’s economy, which is heavily reliant on US multinationals Donald Trump wants to repatriate.While nobody expects Micheál Martin to be subjected to the same humiliating attack as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the US president’s unpredictability and thin skin means Ireland’s taoiseach should be prepared for anything on Wednesday.Adding to the tensions was the recent public contradiction by the Irish foreign minister, Simon Harris of an account of a phone call he had with the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, whose representatives had said Ireland’s “trade imbalance” had been raised as a priority during the conversation.Harris told reporters: “The trade imbalance wasn’t specifically referenced. I was on the call. I was on it for over 20 minutes. It was a very good conversation.” Some saw it as an untimely poking of the beast.Martin is going to DC with three missions: protecting the Irish economy from Trump’s tariffs, raising the plight of the Palestinians, who have strong public support in Ireland, and pressing home the EU’s request that the US sticks with Europe for another few years to give it the time to build up an independent defence capacity.The Irish prime minister is afforded a full day of events in an unusually long agenda – adding to the risk of being tripped up.Martin will start with a traditional breakfast meeting with the vice-president, JD Vance, before a “stakeout” or questions from the media stationed outside the White House.At about 10am, he will move to the Oval Office to sit down in front of the cameras with Trump before the pair disappear from public view behind closed doors for the bilateral meeting.The delegation will then participate in the House speaker’s lunch, an event usually also attended by the president with other meetings before they all convene again for the Shamrock Bowl reception in the East Room, again hosted by Trump, at about 5pm.“The real risk moment is the media spray,” said one source close to the Irish government, referring to the on-camera press event in the Oval Office before Martin’s private meeting with Trump. In the past this has just been a 15-20 minute session with cameras but Trump has got into the habit of turning it into an unscheduled press conference.As Zelenskyy found recently, this can result in hostile questions or tension between the guest and his host – in Martin’s case, potentially on Palestine or trade.The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, has already complained that it was a nonsense that Ireland “of all places” is running a trade surplus with the world’s biggest economy.Last year Ireland exported €72bn to the US – a 34% increase on 2023 – compared with imports valued at €22bn.The US may also raise EU regulation of the big tech firms such as X, Google, Facebook, Instagram, all of which have their EU headquarters in Dublin.Writing in the Irish Times, historian Eoin Drea was withering about Ireland’s reliance on the US.“No other country in the EU is as hopelessly and naively dependent on the US as Ireland,” he said, warning that at “a stroke of pen” Trump could precipitate a budgetary crisis in Dublin.“Ireland is woefully unprepared for Washington’s new political mantra”, he added.One senior business source concurred: “There is obviously intense diplomacy going on. Brexit shows that we know as a country how to read a risk but this time we have been caught offside.”The source added that the fallout from last year’s European court ruling forcing Apple to pay up €13bn in back taxes was a case in point.“We were embarrassed by it. We didn’t want the money. For years nobody really cared about Americans in Ireland, but now the whole world is paying attention. It means that our trade has now got bound up with politics,” said the business source.They were also scathing about a new taskforce set up by Harris to head off ill winds with the inaugural meeting with business representatives two weeks ago.“It was headless chickens. After about an hour and three-quarters of talking what were we left with? Minutes and a diary line for the next meeting, which is not until May. It was fairly perfunctory.”Former Irish ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall said he hoped Martin would emerge unscathed from the day-long Trump experience.“You have to remember Trump likes to like people and he likes to be liked. He’s even managed to convince himself that Putin likes him so it’s not a big stretch to conclude that maybe he likes Micheál too,” he said.“But my view is that there is a long established St Patrick’s Day [tradition of] visits by the taoiseach and they carry a certain kind of tone and content. This gives me hope.”Mulhall suggested an invitation to host a special EU-US summit at Trump’s Irish golf resort in Doonbeg in County Clare combining flattery and business.This however is not in Ireland’s gift – such an invitation would have to come from European Council president, António Costa. 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