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      What would it mean for Trump to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status?

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      Harvard University is in a standoff with Donald Trump after rejecting a series of demands from the president’s administration, which critics view as an attack on the elite college for its reputation among conservatives as a bastion of liberal thought.After cutting off its funding, Trump has reportedly given the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a potentially illegal order to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. Such a decision would mark an escalation in the Republican president’s weaponization of federal government agencies against the people and institutions that defy it.Here’s more about the battle between Trump and Harvard and how the president might try to use the IRS:How did the standoff begin?The Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce this month sent the university a letter saying it had “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment”. It listed demands, including banning face masks, closing its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and cooperating with immigration authorities.How did Harvard react?Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, refused to yield, saying: “[T]he university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” It has retained attorneys William Burck and Robert Hur, both veterans of Republican administrations, who say Trump’s demands are “in contravention of the first amendment”. Harvard’s stand is in contrast to the situation at Columbia University, which acceded to similar demands from the Trump administration in exchange for the restoration of $400m in federal funding that was revoked.How did Trump retaliate?The Trump administration quickly froze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multiyear contracts to Harvard. A member of the president’s antisemitism taskforce attacked the school’s stance, saying it “reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges – that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws”. Trump then called for Harvard to lose its tax-exempt status, and the Washington Post reported that the administration had asked the IRS’s top attorney to revoke it.What is tax-exempt status?If the IRS grants an organization tax-exempt status, they can avoid paying federal income tax, but must follow certain rules. These include refraining from campaign activity or attempting to influence legislation, while no individuals or shareholders are allowed to receive their earnings. According to the IRS, the status is available to charitable, religious, scientific and literary organizations, as well as those involved in preventing cruelty to children or animals, organizing amateur sports competitions or conducting testing for public safety reasons.Can Trump legally ask the IRS to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status?Federal law prohibits the president from directing the IRS to conduct an investigation or audit, and no evidence has yet emerged that the university has done anything to lose its tax-exempt status. White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told US media “any forthcoming actions by the IRS are conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of their tax status were initiated prior to” Trump’s public call for the status to be revoked.Has something like this happened under Trump before?In 2022, after Trump’s first term concluded, the New York Times reported that the former FBI director James Comey and his ex-deputy, Andrew McCabe, had been selected in 2019 for the IRS’s most invasive form of random tax audit. Trump had fired both Comey and McCabe during his term, and tax experts said both of them being selected for the audits was unusual. Trump, who had attacked Comey and McCabe by name even after their dismissals, denied any involvement. More

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      Stephen Colbert on potential alien life: ‘Take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore’

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      Late-night hosts spoke about the Easter weekend, potential alien life and Donald Trump’s recent meeting with the Italian prime minister.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert pointed out that this year’s Easter Sunday also falls on 4/20, the unofficial holiday for weed enthusiasts.He joked that it would be “the Sunday he is risen and you is high”.This week saw Trump meet with the rightwing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. Some had hoped she might “ease the tariff tension” as she is often referred to as a “Trump whisperer”.He then played footage of Meloni speaking in Italian to Trump who complimented her directly after. “I’ll have the same thing she ordered but double meatball, double parm,” Colbert joked.Meloni has now made an offer to Trump to make an official visit to Italy, a place Colbert said he would feel at home as he “looks like a pile of prosciutto with a little spaghetti on top”.Due to massive cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA might have to stop inspections at food facilities. Colbert joked that we would know get to enjoy Tyson’s tangy buffalo beaks and thumbs.The administration is “actively trying to make health officials dumber” with halted efforts to collect data on many issues. It will now lead to “TLC’s sexy new reality show Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Island”.This is all “just the tip of the cutberg” with the weather service also in trouble, seeing 300 employees let go as severe storm season ramps up, “when we need the weather people the most”.Colbert said that Twisters “will soon be the only programming on the weather channel”.He said that some are scrambling to make major discoveries “before science ends forever” such as this week’s reveal that there is possible signature of life on a distant planet.Officials have said that further studies are needed but Colbert expressed excitement, saying: “Please aliens take us to your leader, we don’t have one anymore.”Conspiracy theorists have also claimed that this week’s controversial all-female Blue Origin space stunt was faked. “Oh, I don’t know if I believe that,” he said. “Maybe Kubrick could fake the moon landing but you could never fake Gayle King’s sheer terror.”Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host also spoke about Easter. “If Jesus comes back and sees what’s going on, we are in deep trouble,” he said.Kimmel noted that he was “not sensing a lot of Easter spirit this year” and that Easter Sunday falling on 4/20 will lead to “some very long and confusing egg hunts”.Egg prices remain high, which has seen an “outpouring of tips for other stuff you can colour instead” such as potatoes and marshmallows, but Kimmel said Jesus would only come back for “boiled eggs”.In response to the sky-high prices, he asked: “Is anyone else tired of all the winning yet?”Meanwhile, Trump has given the White House an “extreme makeover” with plenty of gold added. His press secretary called it “the golden office for the golden age”, which Kimmel called “quite the spin”.He joked that for someone anti-DEI, he has the “same taste as Liberace” before asking: “Do you think Donald Trump understands that the story of King Midas is a cautionary tale?”He also spoke about the Meloni visit, joking that Trump probably took her to an Olive Garden to “make her feel at home” before airing a clip of him showing off “his vast knowledge of other lands”.Trump referred to the Congo and said: “I don’t know what that is.” Kimmel asked: “When is someone gonna show that man a map?”He said the government is running like a “well-soiled machine” before moving on to the alien planet news, detailing that researchers have found an equivalent of sea scum. Kimmel joked that we “may have found a new home for Ted Cruz”.The planet is 120 light years away, so Kimmel said “off you go Elon and Jeff, time to climb into those space dildos and boldly go away”.He also joked that we have a “better chance of being visited by aliens than Canadians” with tourism rates down post-tariffs. More

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      Why do Trump voters have no regrets? Because the people they hate are getting hurt more | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The stock market is plunging, prices are rising, federal workers are getting laid off, students are being snatched off the street by immigration agents. The US is many things at the moment, but stable is not one of them. So, amid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move?Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien. I’m not saying that disillusioned Republicans don’t exist; do enough digging and you can certainly find a few. And journalists have been doing a lot of digging. During Trump’s first term, there was a steady stream of media pieces profiling the regretful Trump voter. The genre has remained popular through the first few months of Trump 2.0. But, according to a much-discussed segment by CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten this week, polling proves that the idea of “regretful” Trump voters is “more of a media creation than anything else”.“I hear all these stories, all these articles, all the Trump voters, they regret what they did back in 2024. I’m here to tell you, uh-uh. Very few of them regret what they did back in 2024,” Enten said on Wednesday.Enten was referencing a new poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst which found that just 2% of Trump voters agreed with the statement “I regret my [2024] vote and would vote differently if I could”. That’s almost half the number (3.5%) of Trump voters who said the same thing in February 2017. Meanwhile, 74% of Trump voters said they feel very confident that they made the right choice.Of course, polls aren’t always reliable. Indeed, I’m going to be a little cruel and refer you back to an Enten segment from five days before the election, where the data guru looked at three 2024 polling trends that pointed to a potential victory for vice-president Kamala Harris. “If Harris wins the signs were clear as day,” he declared. In short: Mark Twain had the measure of polling when he said “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.Asking people whether they regret an important choice they just made is also a loaded question. It’s akin to asking them “are you a complete idiot?” So I would treat these particular polls with a dose of caution: just because people don’t actively admit to regretting their vote, it doesn’t mean that they’re not worried about the direction the country is headed in, or that they’re thrilled about Trump’s performance as president. On the contrary, Trump’s approval rating is dropping and a lot of people are worried about inflation and higher prices. Everyone is feeling some pain right now.In a hyper-polarised country, however, what seems to really matter to many voters isn’t how much pain they’re feeling themselves, but whether the other side is suffering more. I could cite various academic papers on the politics of resentment; I could surface endless statistics on the subject. But I think the best summation of Trumpism is a quote from a woman called Crystal Minton from back in 2019, which went viral after being included in a New York Times report. Minton lived in a Florida town that had been ravaged by the double whammy of a hurricane and a Trump administration-instigated government shutdown, and was suffering. “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton complained. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”Right now, however, Trump is hurting the sort of people many of his voters seem to be interested in seeing get hurt. He’s an avenging angel, wreaking vengeance on the elite institutions, scapegoats and bogeymen that the Republican party has spent years blaming for the state of the US. He’s cut funding to all the Ivy League universities he’s called “woke” and declared out of touch with American values. He’s gone after transgender people. And he has rounded up immigrants and protesters, just as he promised he would do.Trump isn’t just doing every vindictive thing he told his supporters he was going to do: he’s trolling his detractors via nasty memes. He’s rubbing salt in their wounds. There has been what Marcus Maloney, a sociology professor at Coventry University in the UK, called a “4Chanification of American politics”. The White House Valentine’s Day post, for example, was a poem: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you”. Cutesy font appeared above the floating heads of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan. And a video last month posted by the White House showed a man being deported while Semisonic’s famous lyrics played in the background: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The cruelty is very much the point.While Trump may be hurting all the people he said he’d be hurting, there’s plenty of pain to go around. There has been a lot of anger from some of Trump’s backers in Wall Street over the volatility that the president’s tariff policy has injected into the stock market. Some of his billionaire backers, such as the investor Bill Ackman, have been screaming bloody murder. But for a lot of Trump’s backers, the fluctuations of the stock market have no immediate effect on their lives. The top 10% of Americans hold 93% of all stocks. This is what happens when inequality reaches record levels: you get a group of people with nothing to lose, which means they have little to regret. You get people happy to burn the whole system down.None of this is to say that Trump voters are immune to remorse. With his tariff plan, he is just getting started. The president may be good at bluster, but even his most diehard supporter are going to realise quite quickly that food prices – which Trump promised to lower on the campaign trail – are not, in fact, going down. When the price of basic goods keep rising, there’s only so long you can keep feeding people obvious lies. Perhaps the Trumpers won’t get quite so much of a dopamine rush from “owning the libs” when they can’t afford to own anything else.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump is creating a selfish, miserable world. Here’s what we can do | Michael Plant

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      In case you hadn’t noticed, things have not been going well for the west.In just three months, Donald Trump has started trade wars, crippled Nato, dismantled USAID and humiliated an invaded democracy while praising its aggressor, among other things. We still have 45 months to go. Through his antics, the US president is normalizing, even encouraging, intense selfishness and disregard for others. The clearest example is USAID: if the richest, most powerful country in the world thinks it’s a waste to give a tiny fraction of its income to the poorest, worst off people in the world, you must be a real sucker if you care for others.This comes on top of a longer trend of declining western happiness and disconnection. In 2012, the United States ranked 11th in the World Happiness Report. This year, it was 24th. In 2023, one in four Americans reported eating all their meals alone. That figure has risen 53% in just two decades.These short- and long-term trends are no coincidence. New research shows that unhappy people vote for populists, those who promise to rip the system apart. Importantly, it also finds that trust explains which type of populists unhappy people support: low-trust people vote for far-right parties, whereas high-trust people go far left. Therefore, we should see Trumpism as both a symptom of a lower-trust, lower-happiness society and a cause of further misery and mistrust.But what should you do if you don’t like the way the world is going? Is there anything you can do?The obvious answer is to rage, doomscroll and hope for the next election. But the obvious answer is no longer an option once we realize the antidote to Trump is to build a happier, higher trust society. Drawing on my dual experience as a moral philosopher and happiness researcher, I’d like to suggest some alternative ways you can fight back.Trumpism is built on pettiness and self-interest, so resisting means embodying the opposite virtues. To paraphrase a much better president: do not ask what the world can do for your happiness – ask what you can do for the happiness of the world. You commit yourself to making the biggest difference you can – even when others do not.It starts internally. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher born a Roman slave, wrote: “We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.” That idea, now a pillar of modern psychotherapy, is especially relevant in moments like this. Trump and co want to make you feel helpless and furious. Keeping your composure and finding joy are acts of resistance.It continues locally. Make an effort to build social connections where you live. Research shows when we share meals with others, volunteer or strike up friendly conversations with strangers, we’re not just making ourselves and others happier. We’re rebuilding the social fabric that authoritarian politics tears apart and reducing the distrust that fuels politicians like Trump. Higher trust and happiness make us less susceptible to the politics of fear and resentment; the data backs this up.Some good news is that our perceptions of mistrust are misplaced. There have been global studies in which researchers drop wallets to see what percentage is returned. A 40-country study found actual wallet return rates are about twice as high as people expected. In the US, two-thirds were returned – against the view that one-third would be. Simply recognizing we can trust others more than we thought is a helpful step forward. You could join a local Action for Happiness group. Recent research even shows prosocial activity is reliably linked to fewer “deaths of despair”. Your kindness could save lives.At the national level, we need to see politicians taking social connection – not just the economy – more seriously. If it seems fluffy or unimportant, look at where ignoring them has got us: he’s in the Oval Office. Academics are starting to assess policies by their “bang for buck” at improving wellbeing: economists at the London School of Economics published a first, milestone review in 2024. Policy nerds should take notice.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt ends globally. My colleagues and I at the Happier Lives Institute recently published the first global analysis of how much happiness different charities produce per dollar. We found a striking result. The most effective charities – often tackling issues such as depression or malnutrition in low-income countries – have about 150 times the impact of the average rich-country charity. If someone gave $150,000 to charity, you would consider them a hero. It turns out you can do as much good by giving $1,000 – if you follow the evidence and pick wisely. Giving 1% of your income to these organizations is a quiet act of moral clarity in a noisy, self-interested world.Fighting back doesn’t have to mean shouting louder. Another option is gracious, determined decency. Choose kindness over cruelty, generosity over selfishness, and evidence over bluster. Today, these quiet choices are acts of radical courage – ones that help build a better tomorrow. They might even make you happier, too.What’s giving me hopeTrumpism is the symptom of a less happy, less trusting society. But we are far from powerless to change this. There are several ways we can each make a difference – starting with our own minds and local communities and finishing with helping others around the world. What gives me hope is realizing we have the potential to understand what’s going wrong in our society and do our part to improve it.

      Michael Plant is the founder and research director of the Happier Lives Institute. He is a global happiness researcher and post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, which publishes the annual World Happiness Report More

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      ‘I don’t want to give money to this America’: tourists’ fears of US travel under Trump

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      Last year, while Joe Biden was US president, Jenny and her husband booked a trip to Boston for June 2025.The British couple had been to New York before and wanted to see more of the country. But after Donald Trump’s re-election in November, Jenny said a “shadow” began to fall on their travel plans.Since Trump took office, reports have emerged from US border points of tourists being detained and interrogated, people with work permits sent to Ice detention centres and even a US citizen seemingly told to leave the country – as well as people being wrongly deported.Overseas visits to the US were down 11.6% in March compared with the same month last year, according to the US National Travel and Tourism Office.“I had a growing feeling that I really didn’t want to give this new America our money,” said Jenny, a 54-year-old former librarian from Northamptonshire. “But it took the news of the detainments at airports and borders to really crystallise our concerns into action.”The pair decided to cancel the trip.Dozens of people responded to an online callout to share their views about travelling to the US in light of the Trump administration’s policies. While several people reported no problems entering and leaving the US, others spoke of anxiety at the border and unpleasant interactions with officials – although many people raised it as being a longstanding problem.Jenny said it was frightening to see the reports of detainments and deportations in the supposed “land of the free”.After deciding not to travel, “we just feel so relieved,” she said. “We’ve now cancelled the flights and hotel and are heading to Crete for a week instead. We’ll visit Boston when Trump is long gone.”Several people who got in touch after travelling to the US recently reported no problem at the border. Sarah, a 39-year-old who works in financial services and lives in Hertfordshire, took her seven-year-old daughter to Miami, the Everglades and the Disney and Universal parks in Orlando this spring.“We were a little nervous about going, given recent coverage,” she said. “Amusingly, our seven-year-old asked earlier this year: ‘Are we still going to America now that man is back?’”Gruff border officials aside, at the airport they found everything was fine. “My husband and I had a conversation about how we’re probably quite privileged at the border, compared to some other families,” Sarah said.“It did make me think, am I being disproportionately frightened of something because of hearing coverage about rare or edge-cases? I tend to be quite data-driven, so hearing these stories in the news, we tried not to worry and just thought that we’ve done everything we need to do with visas and paperwork.”Sarah said her daughter had a great time in Florida and at the parks. “When we got out the airport in Miami, she said: ‘The cars are massive!’”But for some foreign citizens with partners from the US, travelling there feels particularly anxiety-inducing. Paul*, a 44-year-old French citizen living close to the Swiss border, is in a long-distance relationship with his fiancee, who lives in Detroit. He plans to fly from Paris to Chicago in June.“I am very uneasy about travelling because I fear being denied entry – or worse, being detained for whatever reason – and never being able to set foot in the US again,” he said. “As my fiancee and I are planning on getting married in the US in the autumn, this would seriously jeopardise our plans.” For now, he plans to fly.One silver lining of the heightened attention on the US border, he said, could be the exposure of longstanding unsavoury practices.“Rightfully, we’re all appalled at these recent stories,” Paul said, adding that he hoped these incidents would allow westerners to reflect on how border authorities had long treated certain groups.Alex, 39, a Dutch civil servant with a Peruvian background, said when he was flying to Peru to see family in 2017 he was subjected to a “very angry” interrogation by a border official during a layover in Miami. He said they examined his computer and books and asked if he was a communist.“I think it was intimidation for its own sake,” Alex said. “In all honesty I’m quite scared to travel to the US, but at the same time I can’t help but have this strong feeling of irony about this whole situation. Europeans now can face a treatment by the US that was previously reserved for folks from developing countries.”*Some names have been changed. More

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      Trump news at a glance: president takes aim at Harvard, threatening tax-exempt status

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      The Trump administration has taken aim at Harvard, with President Trump calling for the university’s tax-exempt status to be revoked, despite the likely illegality of that threat.The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is reportedly planning to enact the president’s demand, a move that would cost Harvard millions of dollars each year.The move is part on an ongoing battle, and a significant escalation on Trump’s attack on Harvard and his aggressive, multi-pronged assault on higher education institutions. The White has urged Harvard to change its hiring, teaching and admissions practices to help fight antisemitism on campus.Harvard has said that it has taken steps to address the issue, and has received support from institutions such as Stanford University, and other schools united in support of academic freedom.Here are the key stories at a glance:IRS to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status – reportsThe IRS is reportedly planning to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status in what would be a probably illegal move amid Donald Trump’s concerted attack on the independence of US institutions of higher education.Read the full storyÁbrego García’s wife rejects Trump officials’ ‘violent’ depictionsThe wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, has strongly criticized the Trump administration’s attempt to smear his character, saying a temporary restraining order against him was “out of caution” and that “he is a loving partner and father” who is being denied justice.Read the full storyLuigi Mangione indicted on federal murder charge over healthcare CEO killingLuigi Mangione was indicted on Thursday on a federal murder charge in the killing of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel last year, a necessary step for prosecutors to seek the death penalty.The indictment returned by a grand jury in Manhattan federal court also charges Mangione with two counts of stalking and a firearms count.Read the full storyTrump condemns Fed chair over interest ratesDonald Trump early on Thursday condemned the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering US interest rates, and expressed a wish for him to be gone from his role. The US president lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a post on his Truth Social platform.Read the full storySpaceX is frontrunner to build Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as frontrunners to win a crucial part of Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, six people familiar with the matter told Reuters.Read the full storyBooker to visit El Salvador in effort to return wrongly deported manCory Booker plans to travel to El Salvador, a source familiar with the New Jersey senator’s itinerary said, as Democrats seek to pressure the Trump administration to return a wrongly deported Maryland resident.Read the full storyMeloni says Trump to visit Rome after Washington talksGiorgia Meloni said Donald Trump had accepted her invitation for an official trip to Rome, as the pair met in Washington in an attempt by the Italian prime minister to bridge the gap between the EU and US amid trade tariff tensions.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A Turkish PhD student detained after co-authoring an op-ed about Gaza has been denied bond by an immigration judge in Massachusetts.

      Trump’s fledgling media firm urged market regulators to investigate “suspicious activity” after a London-based hedge fund disclosed a vast bet against its stock.

      Two people were killed in a mass shooting at the Florida State University (FSU) campus in Tallahassee on Thursday, and six others were injured, police said. “It’s horrible that things like this take place,” the US president said.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 17 April 2025. More

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      Giorgia Meloni whispers soothing words to Trump on ‘western nationalism’

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      She had been welcomed to the White House with open arms as few other foreign visitors had been since Donald Trump’s return, and Giorgia Meloni wanted to assure her host that – at least when it came to their political worldview – they spoke a common language.Italy’s prime minister, whose Brothers of Italy party has roots in neo-fascism, was keen to stress that she shared many things with the man who had just hailed her as a “friend” who “everybody loves … and respects”.Tariffs were a bit of problem. But between friends? Hey, we can work it out.Even if Italy boasted one of Europe’s biggest trade surpluses with the US, such disagreements could be bridged with recourse to the previously uncoined creed of “western nationalism”, argued Meloni, speaking in confident, lightly accented English, although she admitted she did not know if it was “the right word”.“I know that when I speak about west mainly, I don’t speak about geographical space. I speak about the civilization, and I want to make that civilization stronger,” she said, in terms that the president and his attendant cabinet members-cum-courtiers surely lapped up.“So I think even if we have some problems between the two shores of the Atlantic, it is the time that we try to sit down and find solutions.”After all, Meloni pointed out, they were on the same side when it came to one existential struggle, “the fight against the woke and ADI [sic] ideology that would like to erase our history.”The acronym was a bit confusing. Did she mean DEI? But no matter, her audience got the general gist.Meloni, 48, has been labelled “Europe’s Trump whisperer” – deemed capable of awakening the concealed angels of his nature that other Euro-leaders cannot reach. She has spent time at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, and was the only European leader invited to his inauguration in January.Here, in the Oval Office, the whispering was having a soothing effect. The president smiled indulgently, before going off on several “weaves” during which he attacked Joe Biden, the federal reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates, Biden again, “activist judges” who were blocking his deportation agenda, then Powell once again.But it was standard Trump. The man who had publicly browbeaten Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, and barely tolerated Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer on their White House visits was the very picture of a gracious host.Even JD Vance – whose boorish interventions blew up the Zelenskyy visit and nearly did the same to Starmer’s – kept his trap shut, proof indeed that all was going swimmingly.Then disaster threatened.An Italian journalist insisted on asking the prime minister a question in her native Italian. Mama mia!Meloni looked disgusted. Weren’t they all supposed to be western nationalists here, defenders of the same civilization. Why emphasize differences?She played along reluctantly, her features relaxing slightly as she embarked on an extended discourse, but her body language betraying her as she lifted both feet off the ground, one crossed leg folding behind the other. Trump watched her intently all the while.When she finished, an American journalist tried to ask another question but Trump interjected: “No, wait, I want to hear what you said.”It was over to Meloni’s female interpreter, sitting nearby, who revealed: “Prime Minister Meloni was asked … what she thinks about the fact that President Trump holds Zelenskyy responsible for the war in Ukraine.”It was a discordant, yet key, moment – and the prime minister knew it. As the interpreter tried to continue, Meloni – perhaps sensing this was unsafe territory, not least because she has, for the most part, stuck with the western support for Ukraine that Trump is on the brink of abandoning – took over interpreting her own answer.She limited her explanation to vowing to raise Italy’s contributions to Nato, currently at below 1.5% – well below the 2% minimum agreed, and far short of the 5% Trump has lately demanded.Then it was the president’s turn. “I don’t hold Zelenskyy responsible,” he said, a retreat from his previous false accusations that Ukraine started the war. “But I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that that war started. I’m not happy with anybody involved.”If anybody was to blame, he went on, it was Biden – the default scapegoat for every wrong – because, after all, everyone knew the war would never have started if Trump had still been president.No blame was attached to “President Putin”, the man who actually was responsible for starting the war. “Now I’m trying to get him to stop,” said Trump.For the unfortunate Zelenskyy, widely praised across the west for standing steadfast in defense of his country when it was under attack, there was little charity.“I’m not blaming him. But what I’m saying is that I don’t think he’s done the greatest job, OK? I’m not a big fan, I’m really not.”It was a telling moment of just how far the west’s center of gravity had shifted in the few short weeks since Trump’s return to power. And an uncomfortable one, even for Meloni.Then the conversation moved on to to the common ground of combatting migration – and it was back to the whispering again. More

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      Trump says Fed chair would resign if asked and condemns him over interest rates

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      Donald Trump early on Thursday condemned the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering US interest rates, and expressed a wish for him to be gone from his role.The US president lambasted Powell as “always too late and wrong” in a post on his Truth Social platform. Trump noted that the European Central Bank (ECB) was poised on Thursday to lower interest rates again, without mentioning that the body has been responding to the chaos caused by Trump’s initiatives on tariffs.Addressing reporters later in the day, Trump claimed Powell would resign if he asked him to. Powell himself has said that he would not resign if asked to do so by the president.Trump has been pressuring Powell to cut US interest rates for months, even though the central bank is independent of the administration in setting monetary policy and the White House typically does not publicly lobby the Federal Reserve.The ECB had been expected to cut interest rates for the seventh time this year in order to prop up economic growth, and then did so not long before US markets were due to open. Powell enraged Trump on Wednesday night by warning that the president’s sweeping tariffs could raise inflation. That would make the Fed even more hesitant to cut interest rates.Christine Lagarde, the ECB president, in explaining the reasons why it has – unlike the Fed – cut interest rates, said “the economic outlook is clouded by exceptional uncertainty” because of Trump’s tariffs, which constitute a negative demand shock.Lagarde was speaking after cutting the ECB’s main deposit rate by 25 basis points to 2.25%.Europe had been preparing another interest rate cut following the global financial turmoil caused by Trump’s tariffs push, in which he has gone back and forth on whether, when and how deeply to tax imports from other countries, and on which countries, since he returned to the White House for a second term.He retreated sharply earlier this month from his decision to impose tariffs worldwide, pausing most of the charges for 90 days, although most notably not on China, after markets plunged and US government bonds – traditionally seen as one of the world’s safest financial assets – had suffered a dramatic sell-off. Wall Street chiefs and other experts also forecast a heightened likelihood of recession. Economists polled by Reuters on Thursday put US recession odds at 45%.After insisting for days that he would hold firm on his aggressive trade strategy, unveiled in full on 2 April, which he dubbed “liberation day”, Trump announced on 9 April that all countries that had not retaliated against US tariffs would receive a reprieve – and only face a blanket US tariff of 10% – until July.Powell on Wednesday said the US economy was well-positioned but added that Trump’s tariffs were likely to cause “at least a temporary rise in inflation. The inflationary effects could also be more persistent.”He indicated that the prospect of sweeping tariffs on virtually every trade partner could put the Fed in the unenviable position of having to choose between tackling inflation and unemployment.The World Trade Organization, meanwhile, warned that Trump’s tariffs would send international trade into reverse this year, depressing global economic growth.The International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said the global outlook was also weakening in the face of the Trump tariff onslaught, adding central banks like the Federal Reserve needed to remain agile and credible.“Resilience is being tested again – by the reboot of the global trading system,” she said.Trump also said as part of his Truth Social post at daybreak on Thursday that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough”. He dubbed him, further in the post, “Too Late” and put forward the argument that prices were coming down, from oil to eggs.Trump nominated Powell to become Fed chair during his first term in the White House, in 2018, and Joe Biden renominated him during his term in the White House, in 2022. The US Senate confirms the chair and the US president cannot terminate the head of the Federal Reserve before the end of their four-year fixed stints. Powell is in place until next spring.The US central bank has held interest rates steady at 4.25% to 4.5% since the start of this year.Trump said in his post: “The ECB is expected to cut interest rates for the 7th time, and yet, “Too Late” Jerome Powell of the Fed, who is always TOO LATE AND WRONG, yesterday issued a report which was another, and typical, complete “mess!” Oil prices are down, groceries (even eggs!) are down, and the USA is getting RICH ON TARIFFS. Too Late should have lowered Interest Rates, like the ECB, long ago, but he should certainly lower them now. Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!”The New York Fed president, John Williams, spoke to Fox Business on TV on Thursday and backed up Powell’s wariness on rates.“I don’t see any need to change the setting of the Fed funds rate any time soon … It’s really about collecting information, understanding better what’s happening in the economy during the rest of this year, understanding kind of how the uncertainty plays out,” Williams said.Meanwhile, Politico, citing unnamed sources, reported after Trump’s post that the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, had been cautioning White House officials against any attempt to fire Powell, for which there is no tested mechanism, saying it would risk destabilizing financial markets.And there was a fresh alarm bell sounded on the risk of stagflation, in which high inflation combines with high unemployment amid stagnant economic growth.“A sudden crystallization of the threat to Fed independence would both intensify market stress and shift it in more of a stagflationary direction with a sharp increase in tail risk,” Krishna Guha, vice-chair of an arm of the financial advisory firm Evercore ISI, said in a note.Reuters contributed reporting More