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      Why is Trump behaving like a bully over tariffs? Because he can | Gene Marks

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      Why is Donald Trump so obsessed with tariffs? If you ask me, it’s because America is so freaking huge. California’s economy is bigger than the entire UK’s. Texas’s is larger than all of Canada’s. Florida’s is larger than all of Mexico’s. In its entirety the US economy is about eight times larger than both the Canadian and Mexican economies … combined!Trump is a bully sitting on top of the world’s biggest bully – the American economy. Bullies tend to use their fists to overcome others. Sometimes they can be outwitted. But we all know that strength and size means everything.As a bully, Trump uses tariffs as a weapon and he can get away with it. This is what bullies do. He can threaten smaller countries such as Canada and Mexico because he’s bigger and stronger. He can increase tariffs, cut off funding and limit aid to foreign countries because he knows that, without the US, those organizations and governments would be unable to sustain themselves.And sure, using tariffs as a tool will have collateral damage at home. I recently spoke to an association of building materials distributors and they aren’t exactly thrilled with the potential that their costs of Canadian lumber could rise by 25%. Neither are e-commerce businesses that buy products from China, food service companies that sell Mexican produce or energy companies that rely on oil supplies from up north.But then again there are others that love tariffs. Have a conversation – as I’ve done – with business owners that make steel and have been undercut by Chinese imports or those in the kitchen cabinet manufacturing industry who have faced the same unfair trading practices that has cost them customers and caused them to contract their investing and hiring. Or talk to auto manufacturers whose cars are being tariffed almost five times higher when trying to sell their vehicles in Europe versus the other way around. Or the American companies that have been historically unable to sell their milk, cheese, butter and chicken in Canada because they face existing tariffs exceeding 200%.It’s true that tariffs will benefit some businesses and hurt others. And it’s true that the rising costs of some products will ultimately trickle down to the consumer. But many businesses I know are determined not to let that happen.For example, I have clients in many industries who have been quietly building inventory over the past few months to cushion their supply. I know others who have been aggressively finding alternative suppliers both in the US and in countries that are less exposed to higher tariffs. Others are simply finding ways to cut costs by doing things like reducing their property footprint or investing in technology and AI to offset the increase in the prices of materials. These strategies are easier said than done. But I’ve seen them being implemented by smart, forward-thinking leaders.Regardless, let’s agree that for both businesses and consumers Trump’s tariff adventures are not great, particularly in the short term. They’re disruptive. They’re causing significant uncertainty. They affect margins. They could potentially hit shoppers right in the pocketbook at a time when prices are already high and incomes are barely keeping up.But Trump doesn’t care. He enjoys being a bully and he knows that – given the size of our economy and our influence around the world – he can be. Will his bullying result in a more level playing field for American companies? Will it drive more investment and jobs at home? Will it result in limiting illegal immigration or the importing of fentanyl? Is he doing this for the right reason, which is to make America stronger?Is his bullying justified? Is any bullying justified?Maybe, maybe not. Most of the times bullying isn’t justified, so history is not in his corner. Unfortunately, the rest of us running businesses and going to the grocery store have no way of knowing. We may bask in his success. Or we may suffer if he fails. But one thing’s for sure: he told us he was going to do this and this is what the country asked for when he was elected. More

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      ‘A scary time to be a scientist’: how medical research cuts will hurt the maternal mortality crisis

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      On Tuesday, a few days after the Trump administration announced its plan to slash billions of dollars in funding for biomedical and behavioral research, an investigator at a maternal health research center in Pennsylvania told Dr Meghan Lane-Fall that the cuts may lead her to leave academia altogether.Lane-Fall urged her not to make any sudden moves. “It’s not like nothing has happened. No one’s threatened her job,” said Lane-Fall, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “But if she looks six months down the line, it looks uncertain.”She did advise her colleague to update her resume.Among the many fields of research threatened by the funding cuts is the growing effort to curb the US maternal mortality rate, which is far worse than in other rich nations. Not only could the cuts delay vital breakthroughs but women’s health experts warn they could also push promising young scientists out of the field.“Above and beyond the stalling of progress, we’re going to see this hollowing out of the workforce that’s been working on this research,” Lane-Fall said. “That will reverberate for years, if not decades.”Late last week, the Trump administration declared that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would only reimburse 15% of researchers’ “indirect costs”, which can pay for expenses such as staff and laboratory maintenance. Normally, such costs hover at around 50% for elite universities. If indirect costs are capped at such a low percentage, scientists and the institutions where they work say they will not be able to carry out research.A court ordered that the Trump administration suspend the policy earlier this week, but this change – which was reportedly the work of the Elon Musk-run “department of government efficiency” (Doge) – casts into doubt the future of the NIH, the planet’s premier public funder of biomedical research. In 2023, the NIH spent more than $35bn on grants. If implemented, the new policy would endanger at least $4bn worth of funding, but its impact could go much further, imperiling the ability of research institutions – especially smaller ones – to do their work at all. The US maternal mortality rate almost doubled between 2018 and 2022, with rates of deaths among Black and Indigenous expecting or new mothers increasing at a disproportionally fast clip. States that Donald Trump won may be hit especially hard by NIH cuts: they are home to some of the country’s worst maternal mortality rates.To address this crisis, the NIH in 2023 launched a seven-year, $168m initiative to set up more than a dozen research centers to investigate and improve maternal health outcomes, as well as help train new maternal health researchers. The future of these centers – one of which is co-led by Lane-Fall – are now in question.“We’re working with agencies across 20 Michigan counties – that have more than 7 million people in them – to be able to improve services so that moms don’t get sick and die,” said Dr Jennifer E Johnson, a Michigan State University public health professor who helps run one of the research centers in Flint, Michigan. “To do that, we need offices. We need electricity. We need lights, heat, IT, infrastructure, people to create and sell the contracts. All of the support for that would be cut dramatically.”Normally, Johnson said, NIH reimburses about 57% of the indirect costs for Michigan State University’s grants, including hers. It’s not feasible, she said, for the university to cover those costs on its own or for her center to lower its indirect costs so substantially.“If we can’t turn on the lights and we can’t pay the rent and we can’t get people hired – I don’t know what we would do,” Johnson said. “The research is the car. All the infrastructure costs are the road. You can go a little while, but if there’s no maintenance on that, it’s a problem.”Several of the institutions that host the maternal health centers – which tend to focus on improving maternal mortality among people of color and rural communities – are set to lose millions over the NIH cuts. Stanford University officials have said the school, whose center aims to reduce the risk of dangerous postpartum hemorrhages, would take a $160m loss. The University of Utah, which studies how drug addiction impacts pregnancy, would lose $45m.The Guardian reached out to dozens of researchers who have NIH grants to study the health of women, children and parents. Many declined to speak, often citing the ongoing uncertainty of the situation. “I’m honestly not sure what to say as like most of my colleagues I was taken off guard and it’s really unclear how this will play out now that courts are involved,” one scientist, from Missouri, wrote in an email.While Republicans have generally been supportive of Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to the government in the last few weeks, some members of Congress have expressed alarm about the NIH cuts. “It’s pretty drastic. So I’m thinking we need to look at this,” Shelley Moore Capito, the West Virginia senator, told the Washington Post. Alabama senator Katie Britt said she planned to work with Robert F Kennedy Jr, the new leader of the Department of Health and Human Services, to address the impact. “A smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama,” she told AL.com.One of the agencies behind the maternal health centers is the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health – whose website has been hollowed out by the Trump administration’s recent, widespread purges of government websites. Links to pages on the Office of Research on Women’s Health website about “funding opportunities and notices”, “research programs and initiatives” and “supporting women in biomedical careers” have all vanished.“It is a scary time to be a scientist in the United States,” said Johnson, who is also concerned about recent reports of efforts at the National Science Foundation – an NIH sibling agency that focuses on scientific and engineering research – to scrutinize projects that include words like “women”, “disability” and “underrepresented”. Johnson continued: “All of a sudden, we’re working in a world where we’re not sure we’re going to be allowed to say what the data clearly shows.”On Monday, the day the new policy was supposed to take effect, the Association of American Medical Colleges sued to halt it.“Even at larger, well-resourced institutions, this unlawful action will impose enormous harms, including on these institutions’ ability to contribute to medical and scientific breakthroughs,” the association, which represents several of the US medical schools that host maternal health centers, said in its lawsuit. The association continued: “Smaller institutions will fare even worse – faced with more unrecoverable costs on every dollar of grants funds received, many will not be able to sustain any research at all and could close entirely.”A federal judge then ordered Trump to suspend the cuts, writing in a court order that implementing the cuts would cause “immediate and irreparable injury”. A hearing in the case is set for 21 February.However, it is unclear whether Trump will obey. Although the administration is legally required to heed court orders, a federal judge ruled in another case this week that Trump had defied an order to halt a separate freeze in federal funding. Disregarding court orders may tee up a showdown between the executive and judicial branches of the government – and a constitutional crisis.Regardless of when, how or if NIH grants function in the future, Lane-Fall believes the chaos unleashed by the Trump administration has already led science to suffer. Lane-Fall had to pause plans to hold a conference and told some postdoctoral students that they cannot yet move forward with research projects. She’s now worried that maternal health centers – who have built partnerships with local groups that champion doulas, breastfeeding among Black women and more – will not be able to compensate those groups.“One really important trend in maternal and child health research is that we are working now more with communities than we ever have before, because we understand that there’s a lot of lived experience and expertise in communities. Part of what makes that partnership possible is that we’re able to compensate them for their time,” Lane-Fall said. “When we go to those communities and we say: ‘We promised you money, but it might not be there’ – that is devastating.”Dr Nancy E Lane is haunted by the idea that the confusion will lead women’s health scientists to leave academia. A University of California, Davis, doctor who specializes in osteoporosis and osteoarthritis, Lane was part of a 2024 report calling for more NIH funding for women’s health. Between 2013 and 2023, just 8.8% of NIH grant dollars focused on investigating it.“My career has tremendously benefited from the resources from the National Institutes of Health. It’s what made me who I am,” Lane said. “How much will the current generation put up with this before they’ll just throw their hands up?” More

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      The courts are a crucial bastion against Trump. What if he ignores their orders?

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      Years before he became the US vice-president and openly advocated defiance of the courts over the Trump administration’s blitz through the federal bureaucracy and constitution, JD Vance revealed his contempt for legal constraints.In 2021, Vance predicted that Donald Trump would again be elected president and advised him to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people”.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” he told the Jack Murphy Live podcast.Whether the seventh American president actually said that remains disputed, but the sentiment is alive and well as the Trump administration defies federal court orders to at least pause its subversion of the constitution and destructive rampage through the federal bureaucracy led by Elon Musk.In the absence of action by Congress to defend its powers, it has been government workers, state attorneys general and unions who have counterattacked, with a flurry of lawsuits – challenging presidential orders to limit the constitutional right of anyone born in the US to be a citizen, a federal funding freeze, and the dismissal of corruption watchdogs, among other measures. Nearly 50 legal challenges have been filed in the last three weeks, an unprecedented pushback in the courts against a new administration.The lawsuits have resulted in a string of court rulings. They have put a hold on some of Trump’s executive orders freezing some spending. They have also restricted Musk, head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, from sending his staff to rifle through the financial records of federal agencies such as the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and the education department as a means to restrict their work or even close them down.But it quickly became apparent that the administration was defying some of the court orders, while its supporters attacked what they called “rogue judges” for ruling against Trump – and Vance portrayed the courts as just another bureaucratic obstacle to the president implementing the people’s will.That has prompted warnings from legal scholars, including Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley law school, of a constitutional crisis in the making.“It’s very frightening to think that they will disobey court orders. If they don’t, it will be a constitutional crisis unlike anything this country has seen, because if the president can violate constitutional laws and disobey court orders then the name for that is a dictatorship,” he said.“This isn’t the realm of normal. What we’ve seen in the first three weeks is unprecedented in American history.”The judge John McConnell has accused the Trump administration of deliberately disobeying an order obliging the government to reinstate billions of dollars in grants. Another judge, Loren AliKhan, accused the administration of defying its legal obligations after she ordered the office for budget and management (OMB) to halt a spending freeze.Vance pushed back against the rulings on X.“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” he wrote.“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”Musk called for one of the judges involved to be impeached.Trump won a victory on Thursday when a judge ruled in favour of Musk’s offer to almost all of the 2 million-strong federal workforce of eight months of pay for not working if they resign now. The email’s subject line, “Fork in the Road”, was the same as one he used in a message to employees when he bought Twitter in 2022 and got rid of about 80% of its staff. Shortly after the deadline set by the email for voluntary redundancy, which was accepted by about 65,000 federal workers, unions said involuntary dismissals had begun.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, praised the rare court victory.“This goes to show that lawfare will not ultimately prevail over the will of 77 million Americans who supported President Trump and his priorities,” she said.But mostly the courts have so far ruled against the Trump administration as it pursues a power grab.The American Bar Association, which represents hundreds of thousands of lawyers in the US, has condemned what it called the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself”.“We have seen attempts at wholesale dismantling of departments and entities created by Congress without seeking the required congressional approval to change the law,” it said.The ABA also condemned “efforts to dismiss employees with little regard for the law and protections they merit” and social media posts intended “to inflame”.“This is chaotic. It may appeal to a few. But it is wrong. And most Americans recognize it is wrong. It is also contrary to the rule of law,” it said.It’s likely that at least some of the flood of lawsuits will end up before the supreme court. The administration may in fact want to see some cases reach the highest court, which has a solid conservative majority after Trump appointed three of its nine justices during his first term, as it seeks to consolidate even more power in the presidency over issues such as who has final control over spending allocated by Congress.But the process of moving through district and appeals courts before making it to the supreme court is unlikely to be swift, by which time Musk may already have achieved much of what he aims to do in wrecking the work of USAid, the education department and other federal agencies.Then there is the unpredictability of a supreme court that has already overturned precedent in striking down the right to abortion.Chemerinsky believes the Trump administration is all but certain to lose cases on birthright citizenship, the freeze on spending and the dismissals of commissioners that oversee labour rights, consumer protection and equal employment opportunities, because they are in breach of federal law. He said the court was also likely to order the administration to back down from attempts to eliminate individual agencies created by Congress.But what if the administration follows Vance’s call to openly defy the courts? Chemerinsky said that would set up “a constitutional confrontation unlike any we’ve seen”.“The courts have limited ability to enforce their orders. They could hold individuals other than the president in contempt of court. They could figure out who’s responsible for carrying out the court order and hold that person in contempt with fines or jail for civil contempt. But the idea of the courts holding a cabinet secretary, an attorney general, a secretary of defence in contempt is just unheard of in the United States,” he said.“It’s so hard to imagine where we’ll be in four years. When you think about what’s going on in just three weeks, it’s certain Donald Trump is claiming expansive executive power beyond what any president has ever asserted. How much will the courts allow that? There’s no way to know.” More

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      Elon Musk’s ‘efficiency’ agency team at the Pentagon to meet defense staff

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      Members of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” arrived at the Pentagon Friday, in what appeared to be their first meeting with defense department staff, a US official told Reuters. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.Donald Trump has said the Pentagon would be an early target of Musk’s government budget and personnel slashing team and that he expects the tech billionaire to find hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and abuse in the department.Last week, Trump confirmed that he had asked Musk to review spending in the sprawling defense department. “I’ve instructed him to go check out education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad.”Defense department spending has long been the subject of debate across the political spectrum, with its budget approaching $1tn per year. In December, then president Joe Biden signed a bill authorizing $895bn in defense spending for the fiscal year. But Democrats have questioned whether Musk – an unelected official with lucrative contracts at the department through his company SpaceX – is the best poised to negotiate reforms.In recent months, Trump has formed a close relationship with Musk as the world’s richest man spent $250m on the president’s re-election campaign. When he took office, Trump appointed Musk to lead the newly formed, so-called “department of government efficiency”.Since then, the agency has called for mass layoffs across many government agencies, including the US Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the General Services Administration. More layoffs are expected to follow at the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services.On Tuesday, Musk took questions from reporters alongside the president in an Oval Office ceremony regarding the closure of government offices. Next week, the pair are expected to appear together on Fox News in their first televised joint appearance.Musk’s team’s meeting at the Pentagon came the same day it published classified information on its website, according to the Huffington Post. The leak included statistics from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites – including hundreds built by Musk’s SpaceX company. The office’s budgets and head counts are classified.Also Friday, a federal judge extended a temporary order blocking Doge from accessing treasury records that contain sensitive personal data such as social security and bank account numbers for millions of Americans. The case alleges the Trump administration allowed Musk’s team access to the treasury department’s central payment system in violation of federal law.A government watchdog is expected to launch an inquiry into security over the US treasury’s payments system.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, another close Trump ally, has downplayed concerns about Musk’s agenda for the agency. Hegseth said he had already been in touch with Musk but on Tuesday added: “We’re not going to do things that are to the detriment of American operational or tactical capabilities.” Hegseth has said he wants to increase overall US defense spending. More

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      Under-pressure prosecutors ask to drop Eric Adams charges after seven resign

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      Under immense pressure from Donald Trump’s justice department leadership, prosecutors in Washington have asked a federal judge to dismiss the criminal corruption case against Eric Adams, the New York mayor, rather than see the entire public integrity office be fired.The prosecutors, Edward Sullivan and Antoinette Bacon, filed the request on Friday night to withdraw the charges against Adams that included bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions.The move capped a week of turmoil at the department where seven prosecutors – including the acting US attorney in southern district of New York, the head of the criminal division and the head of the public integrity section – resigned in protest rather than dismiss the case for political reasons.And it followed an extraordinary showdown after the acting deputy attorney general Bove, facing opposition from prosecutors in New York and pushing to bring the justice department to heel, forced the public integrity section to find someone to put their name on the dismissal or be fired themselves.The roughly hour-long meeting, where the public integrity section weighed whether to resign en masse after agreeing that the dismissal of the Adams case was improper, culminated with Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, agreeing to take the fall for his colleagues, according to two people familiar with the matter.The decision gave the justice department what it needed to seek the end of the Adams case. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, said in an appearance on Fox News afterwards that the mayor’s case “is being dismissed today”, although that power rests with the presiding US district judge, Dale Ho, in New York.Ho has limited ability to deny the request but could still order an evidentiary hearing into why the department was ordering the end of the corruption case against Adams, which threatens to unearth deeper revelations into the fraught background behind a decision castigated by the lead prosecutor as a quid pro quo deal.The department’s rationale to dismiss the case was necessarily political: Bove had argued that it was impeding Adams from fully cooperating with Trump’s immigration crackdown – and was notably not making the decision based on the strength of the evidence or legal theory underpinning the case.The saga started on Monday. After Bove ordered the charges against Adams to be withdrawn, Danielle Sassoon, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, sent a remarkable letter to the attorney general that said Bove’s directive was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor”.Sassoon also made a startling accusation in her letter, writing that the mayor’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed”.A lawyer for Adams, Alex Spiro, denied the accusation, saying: “The idea that there was a quid pro quo is a total lie. We offered nothing and the department asked nothing of us. We were asked if the case had any bearing on national security and immigration enforcement and we truthfully answered it did.”On Friday, Adams himself said in a statement: “I never offered – nor did anyone offer on my behalf – any trade of my authority as your mayor for an end to my case. Never.”Sassoon, a conservative career prosecutor, also revealed in her letter that her team had intended in recent weeks to add a further obstruction of justice charge against Adams. For good measure, she castigated Bove for scolding a member of her team for taking notes at the meeting and ordering that the notes be confiscated.Apparently realizing that Sassoon would not agree to drop the case, two people familiar with the matter said, Bove attempted to end-run the situation by having the public integrity section at justice department headquarters in Washington take over the case and request its dismissal.The move prompted a wave of resignations from career prosecutors. On Thursday, Bove wrote back to Sassoon criticizing her for insubordination and placing her two lieutenants, Hagan Scotten and Derek Wikstrom, on administrative leave.Meanwhile, in Washington, Kevin Driscoll, the acting head of the criminal division which oversees public integrity, tendered his resignation with John Keller, the acting head of the integrity section itself, rather than go along with the dismissal.After Keller’s departure,Marco Palmieri became the third of four deputy chiefs of the public integrity section to resign, leaving the team without a clear leadership aside from three senior litigation counsels who served under the deputy chiefs.By Friday, Scotten resigned while on administrative leave. In a scathing rebuke of Bove, he wrote: “If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” More

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      Trump and Vance are courting Europe’s far right to spread their political gospel

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      The Trump administration is making a big bet on Europe’s hard right.Speaking at a conference of Europe’s leaders in Munich on Friday, the US vice-president JD Vance stunned the room by delivering what amounted to a campaign speech against Germany’s sitting government just one week before an election in which the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim AfD is set to take second place.As Vance accused foreign leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs, a whisper of “Jesus Christ” and the squirming in chairs could be heard in an overflow room.Hours later he met with Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, breaking a taboo in German politics called the “firewall against the far-right”, meant to kept the anti-immigrant party with ties to extremists out of the mainstream and of any ruling coalition.“It’s an incredibly controversial thing for him to do,” said Kristine Berzina, the managing director of the German Marshall Fund’s Geostrategy North, who was at the Munich Security Conference.The backing of Vance – or Elon Musk, who recently gave a video address at an AfD party summit – is unlikely to tilt the result of Germany’s elections, said Berzina. And it’s unlikely to browbeat the ruling Christian Democratic Union, which should win next week’s vote, into allowing AfD to enter any coalition.But the US right under Trump does have its eyes set on a broader transformation in Europe: the rise of populist parties that share an anti-immigration and isolationist worldview and will join the US in its assault on globalism and liberal values. They see those leaders in Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, as well as the UK’s Reform party and Marine Le Pen in France.“It is personal and it is political in terms of far-right political alignment,” she said. “It also opens the door to what other unprecedented things are we going to see in terms of the US hand in European politics.”Could the US president even threaten serious policy shifts like tariffs based on an unsatisfactory German coalition? “That would be normally unthinkable,” she said in response to that question. “But in 2025, very little is unthinkable.”Trump has claimed a broad mandate despite winning the popular vote by a smaller margin than any US leader since the early 2000s. And he seeks to remake politics at home and redefine the US relationship with its allies abroad, many of whom attacked him personally in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and his second presidential campaign.Vance also wanted to antagonise Europe’s leaders on Friday. He refused to meet with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor who should be among the US’ key partners in negotiations with Russia over the future of the war in Ukraine. “We don’t need to see him, he won’t be chancellor long,” one former US official told Politico of the Vance team’s approach.That speaks to a trend in the Trump administration’s thinking: that voters abroad will handle what his negotiations and alliances cannot. As Vance stunned the European elite on Friday, he told them that “if you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you”.“You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years,” he said.This is something that Vladimir Putin, who waited years for the return of a Trump administration, knows well regarding his war in Ukraine: sometimes you have to bide your time until conditions are right.And it’s something that Trump intimated about Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he riffed on his plan to end the war through negotiations that would cede Ukrainian territory and give up Kyiv’s designs on Nato membership.“He’s going to have to do what he has to do,” Trump said of Zelenskyy agreeing to a deal. “But, you know, his poll numbers aren’t particularly great.” More

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      Trump to cut off funding for schools and universities with Covid vaccine mandates – US politics live

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      Donald Trump has convened the press in the Oval Office to sign an executive order cutting off federal funding for schools and universities that require students be vaccinated against Covid-19 to attend classes.In addition to that order, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president had signed another order establishing an “Energy Dominance Council” led by the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, and energy secretary, Chris Wright. Leavitt made a point to note that the Associated Press was not in attendance.More news of federal layoffs continues to roll in, this time from the department of health and human services – which Trump ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed to lead in a controversial vote yesterday. According to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post, the department is in the process of firing about 5,200 health workers.The news comes just hours after the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – which is housed within HHS – will lose about 10% of its employees, following a Trump administration order to fire all hires still in their probationary period. That amounts to about 1,300 employees.Amid Donald Trump’s rampant efforts to downsize the civilian federal workforce, the president’s new veterans affairs secretary Doug Collins has announced plans to lay off at least 1,000 employees. He promised the layoffs (and subsequent $98 million cut in the department’s budget) will not affect veteran care or benefits. “I take Secretary Collins at his word when he says there will be no impact to the delivery of care, benefits, and services for veterans with this plan,” said Rep. Mike Bost, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.The ranking Democrat, Rep. Mark Takano, said the firings show a shocking disregard. The terminated include disabled veterans, military spouses and medical researchers.A second federal judge has paused Donald Trump’s order restricting healthcare for transgender youth.The temporary restraining order came from the US district court judge Lauren King in Seattle just a day after a federal judge in Baltimore also temporarily blocked the president’s executive order.Democratic attorneys general from Washington state, Oregon and Minnesota filed the Seattle lawsuit, arguing that the order discriminates against transgender people.The presidential order halted federal support for gender-affirming care for trans youth under 19, including by ending funding to institutions that offer such care and excluding the care from government-run insurance coverage.Gender-affirming healthcare includes a range of therapies – from emotional support to vocal coaching, puberty blockers and sometimes hormones and surgery. The treatments are considered the standard of care and are endorsed by all US medical associations.Since Trump returned to office last month, he has signed a series of executive orders targeting trans Americans, including by banning trans athletes from women’s sports, declaring the government will only recognize the male and female sexes and transferring incarcerated trans women to men’s facilities; a US judge temporarily blocked federal prisons from implementing the order to move trans people. Many of the orders have been framed as “defending women”.Donald Trump and Elon Musk will jointly appear on Fox News next week with host Sean Hannity. It will be the pair’s first televised interview together.In recent months, Trump has formed a close relationship with Musk, resulting in his appointment to lead the newly formed, so-called “department of government efficiency”. On Tuesday, Musk took questions from reporters alongside the president in an Oval Office ceremony regarding the closure of government offices. Musk spent $250m on the president’s re-election campaign.The Internal Revenue Service will lay off thousands of probationary employees, beginning potentially next week, the New York Times reports.The firings are in line with orders from the Office of Personnel Management, which acts as the federal government’s human resources department, to let go of employees new in their positions, who have fewer job protections.The layoffs come amid the annual tax season, as Americans file returns ahead of the 15 April deadline. The Times notes the layoffs seem to contradict comments to Bloomberg News from Treasury secretary Scott Bessent last week, who said any layoffs at the IRS would come after that deadline.At his speech today to a high-profile security conference in Germany, JD Vance made a number of claims that offer a window into how he views the United States’s relationship with the world.The problem is, several of them stretch the truth, as the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey and Alexandra Topping report:Donald Trump has green-lit the first new export of liquified natural gas since Joe Biden paused approvals early last year amid concerns over their impact on climate change, Reuters reports.The decision allows Louisiana’s Commonwealth LNG to export gas to markets in Asia and Europe. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump also said 600m acres (243m hectares) of offshore waters controlled by the federal government will reopen to oil and gas drilling, reversing a ban imposed by Biden.Here’s more about Biden’s steps against natural gas:Donald Trump revealed to reporters that he had spoken to Keir Starmer, and that they may meet in the next few weeks, Reuters reports.We first heard about the call, which came as something of a surprise to the British prime minister and his aides, earlier today:Donald Trump has convened the press in the Oval Office to sign an executive order cutting off federal funding for schools and universities that require students be vaccinated against Covid-19 to attend classes.In addition to that order, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the president had signed another order establishing an “Energy Dominance Council” led by the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, and energy secretary, Chris Wright. Leavitt made a point to note that the Associated Press was not in attendance.JD Vance had no time to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz during his travel to the country, but did find an opportunity to sit down with the leader of the far-right AfD party, according to media reports.It was German broadcaster ZDF that broke news of the vice-president’s encounter with the AfD chief Alice Weidel, which lasted for about 30 minutes and saw them discuss the war in Ukraine and politics in Berlin. As for Scholz, Politico reports that Vance’s spokesperson cited a “scheduling conflict” the prevented them from meeting. But a former US official, referring to team Vance’s thinking, put it this way:
      We don’t need to see him, he won’t be chancellor long.
      Vance’s speech to the Munich security forum earlier in the day included a line seen as indicating his support for the AfD, which is expected to make gains in elections later this month. Follow our live blog for more: More