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      US Naval Academy to no longer consider race when evaluating candidates

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      The US Naval Academy has changed its policy and will no longer consider race as a factor when evaluating candidates to attend the elite military school, a practice it maintained even after the US supreme court barred civilian colleges from employing similar affirmative action policies.The Trump administration detailed the policy change in a filing on Friday asking a court to suspend an appeal lodged by a group opposed to affirmative action against a judge’s decision last year upholding the Annapolis, Maryland-based Naval Academy’s race-conscious admissions program.Days after returning to office in January, Donald Trump signed an executive order, on 27 January, that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the military.The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, two days later issued guidance barring the military from establishing “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admission or career fields”.The US Department of Justice said that in light of those directives, V Adm Yvette Davids, the Naval Academy’s superintendent, issued guidance barring the consideration of race, ethnicity or sex as a factor in its admissions process.The justice department said that policy change could affect the lawsuit filed by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by affirmative action opponent Edward Blum, which has also been challenging race-conscious admissions practices at other military academies.Blum’s group had been seeking to build on its June 2023 victory at the supreme court, when the court’s 6-3 conservative majority sided with it by barring policies used by colleges and universities for decades to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and other minority students on US campuses.That ruling invalidated race-conscious admissions policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But it explicitly did not address the consideration of race as a factor in admissions at military academies, which the conservative supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, said had “potentially distinct interests”.After the ruling, Blum’s group filed three lawsuits seeking to block the carve-out for military schools. The case the group filed against the Naval Academy was the first to go to trial.But a federal judge in Baltimore, Richard Bennett, sided with then president Joe Biden’s administration in finding that the Naval Academy’s policy was constitutional. More

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      Food Banks Left in the Lurch as U.S.D.A. Shipments Are Suspended

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      Food banks across the country are scrambling to make up a $500 million budget shortfall after the Trump administration froze funds for hundreds of shipments of produce, poultry and other items that states had planned to distribute to needy residents.The Biden administration had slated the aid for distribution to food banks during the 2025 fiscal year through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which is run by the Agriculture Department and backed by a federal fund known as the Commodity Credit Corporation. But in recent weeks, many food banks learned that the shipments they had expected to receive this spring had been suspended.Vince Hall, chief of government relations for Feeding America, a nationwide network of over 60,000 food pantries and other distributors, said that when he asked U.S.D.A. officials about the suspended shipments, he was told that the department was reviewing the food aid programs funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation.It was unclear whether the review was related to the activities of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, which has sought to curtail spending across the government.The halt to the funds, which was first reported by Politico, comes in addition to other recent cuts to federal food assistance. Earlier this month, the Agriculture Department halted two other programs that distributed food to banks and schools. Lawmakers are also mulling cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, which were used by about 42 million people in the 2023 fiscal year.Food bank directors fear that an across-the-board contraction to federal food assistance could drive more people to food banks just as they are losing access to critical supplementary funds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Appoints Michael Flynn, Walt Nauta and Other Allies to Oversee U.S. Military Academies

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      President Trump moved on Monday to stack the boards overseeing U.S. military service academies with conservative activists and political allies, including Michael T. Flynn and Walt Nauta, who were charged in connection to earlier investigations of Mr. Trump and his presidential campaign.Mr. Nauta, a military aide working as a White House valet while Mr. Trump was president, was appointed to the board overseeing the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Mr. Nauta was charged with aiding Mr. Trump in obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve a trove of highly sensitive documents that Mr. Trump kept after he left office — one of four criminal cases against Mr. Trump that shadowed him during his presidential campaign last year.Mr. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and a national security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term, was named to the oversight board of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York. Mr. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during a wider investigation into contacts between the first Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials. Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Flynn.Other allies of the president appointed to the oversight boards included Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist whose organization aided Mr. Trump in the 2024 election; Dina Powell, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump; Sean Spicer, Mr. Trump’s first White House press secretary; and Maureen Bannon, the daughter of Steve Bannon who helps run his podcast. Mr. Trump also appointed Republican members of Congress and other military veterans to oversee the academies.Mr. Kirk, who was appointed to the board overseeing the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, had joined other conservatives in assailing the U.S. military leadership before Mr. Trump took office in January, arguing that the armed forces had gone soft under the Biden administration. Soon after the election, he gleefully predicted that Pete Hegseth, now the defense secretary, would “end the wokeification of the U.S. military.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rejected by Washington, Federal Workers Find Open Arms in State Governments

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      Where the federal government sees waste, states see opportunity — both to serve as a counterweight to the Trump administration and to recruit some much-needed talent.In the weeks since the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began eliminating jobs, state and local governments have been actively recruiting federal workers impacted by the Trump administration’s effort to dramatically reduce the federal work force.Hawaii is fast-tracking job applications. Virginia started a website advertising its job market. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania signed an executive order aimed at attracting federal employees to the state’s 5,600 “critical vacancies” in the state government. Both New Mexico and Maryland announced expanded resources and agencies to help federal workers shift into new careers in the state, and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York is encouraging people to “come work in the greatest state in the nation.”There has been interest. The New York governor’s office said roughly 150 people have signed up to attend information sessions hosted by the state’s Department of Labor.But it’s too soon to say how many federal employees are applying for state-level roles and how exactly demographics could shift as a result, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.There were about 2.3 million civilians employed by the federal government’s executive branch when President Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20. Thousands of government jobs have been cut as part of DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts across a range of agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Baltimore State’s Attorney to Withdraw Motion to Vacate Adnan Syed’s Conviction

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      The case of Mr. Syed, who has spent decades in prison for the murder of his high school girlfriend, was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial.”The Baltimore City state’s attorney announced on Tuesday that his office would withdraw a motion to vacate the conviction against Adnan Syed, who has spent decades in prison while fighting charges that he had killed his high school girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.Mr. Syed’s case was chronicled in the hit podcast “Serial,” which presented new evidence and led to a swell of interest in the case. The previous Baltimore prosecutor had asked a judge to overturn the conviction in 2022, citing issues with initial evidence and other possible suspects.Though the charges against Mr. Syed were dropped that year, his conviction was later reinstated and Maryland’s highest court ordered a redo of the hearing that freed him.In a statement, the Baltimore City state’s attorney, Ivan J. Bates, said that his office had determined that the motion to vacate the conviction by his predecessor contained “falsehoods and misleading statements.”“I did not make this decision lightly, but it is necessary to preserve the credibility of our office and maintain public trust in the justice system,” Mr. Bates said.The release of “Serial” in 2014 raised doubts about the facts around the case. The podcast was downloaded more than 100 million times in its first year and brought national public attention to Mr. Syed’s case. (In 2020, The New York Times Company bought Serial Productions, the company behind the podcast.)This is a developing story. More

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      Chain, chain, chain: political theatre confirms Elon Musk’s Maga hero status at jubilant CPAC

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      What do you give the man who has everything? A ballroom full of cheering conservative activists found out this week when Elon Musk was presented with a chainsaw by Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, who has used the power tool as a symbol of his push to impose fiscal discipline.Wearing sunglasses, a black Maga baseball cap and a gold necklace, Musk giddily wielded the chainsaw up and down the stage. “This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy!” he declared. Members of the audience shouted: “We love you!” Musk replied: “I love you guys, too!” And he quipped: “I am become meme.”It was a wild political theatre that confirmed Musk’s status as a new hero of the Maga movement. The head of Tesla and SpaceX had been fully embraced by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), long a window on the soul of the Republican party and, in recent years, a purity test among Donald Trump’s support base.This year’s conference at National Harbor in Maryland was a four-day celebration not only of Trump’s return to the White House but the rise of global rightwing populism. Emboldened, exultant and convinced that their momentum is unstoppable, speakers put less emphasis than usual on baiting liberals and more on spreading the Maga gospel around the world.Attendees were united in praise for the shock-and-awe approach of Trump’s first month in office, which JD Vance described as “a hell of a lot of fun”. Brett Hawkes, 69, from Rockville, Maryland, hailed the “blitzkrieg”; Christopher Cultraro, 19, from Easton, Pennsylvania, called it “phenomenal”; Adelbert Walker, 72, from Petersburg, Virginia, said: “He’s keeping his promises. He’s going about his agenda at warp speed.”View image in fullscreenThe enthusiasm extended to Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, which has slashed the federal government and fired thousands of workers in ways that have been challenged in the courts.Musk, the world’s richest man, who has blocked food and medicine for the world’s poorest people by gutting the agency responsible for delivering US aid, told CPAC: “We’re trying to get good things done, but also, like, you know, have a good time doing it and, you know, and have, like, a sense of humour.”Republicans including Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary; Pam Bondi, the attorney general; Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives speaker; Rick Scott, the Florida senator; and Eric Schmitt, the Missouri senator all took the stage to heap praise on Musk and Doge.Rightwing figures from overseas got in on the act. Britain’s Nigel Farage called Musk a “hero of free speech” and lauded the “amazing Doge project” a month after the tech billionaire suggested that Farage should stand down as leader of the Reform UK party.Liz Truss, the former British prime minister, indicated that Musk is now part of the Maga brand when she declared: “We want a Trump revolution in Britain. We want to flood the zone. We want Elon and his nerd-army of Musk rats examining the British deep state.”View image in fullscreenBut across America, there are already stirrings of a backlash against Musk’s “nerd army” of mostly young male engineers with no government experience. Members of Congress were this week confronted by raucous town halls in which citizens complained about Doge’s chaotic, indiscriminate and illegal tactics.Some 71% of people agree that the very wealthy have too much influence on the White House, according to a Reuters/ Ipsos survey, while 58% are concerned that programmes such as social security retirement payments and student aid could be delayed by Musk’s campaign.CPAC attendee Ashlie Hightower, who lives in northern Virginia, acknowledged that workers there are suffering the consequences of Musk’s cuts. She said: “Many people have been affected because it’s a huge area that mostly works for government or has some connection to government. I understand that and it might be painful at first.”Even so, Hightower approves of Doge’s actions, saying: “What they have discovered is that we can actually get out of debt if we rein in some of this nonsense spending. Right now they’ve found it’s equal to about 20 or 30% of our GDP. It incredible. I feel rejuvenated.”Others joined in the plaudits for Musk. Matthew Kochman, 76, a property broker from New York, said: “He’s a genius. What’s wrong with that? He could put people on Mars and the federal government is so effed up it’s not funny. He can do nothing but help. If you find $1 of waste, you’re doing a good thing. If you find $500bn, how can anybody possibly find fault with that unless you’re a moron?”Kochman, who drives a vehicle that he calls a “Trumpmobile”, is equally impressed by the president, saying: “He’s going Trump speed, as they say, and he’s not going to waste any time. He’s doing everything that he promised to do and he’s following the agenda to try and bring the country back from chaos and failure.”One big beast of CPAC is more ambivalent about South African-born Musk, however. Steve Bannon, a rightwing populist and former Trump adviser, regards Musk’s oligarch status and pro-immigration views with deep suspicion. He told the conservative website UnHerd: “Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiment and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, tradition or values.”But in his CPAC speech, Bannon welcomed Doge’s assault on the administrative state and even dubbed Musk “Superman”. And on Friday, a long queue of people waiting to take selfies with Bannon included plenty of Musk admirers content to square that circle.Michael Stearns, 30, who works at a golf course near Nashville, Tennessee, was wearing a Nasa sweater and said: “I’m a big Steve Bannon fan. I love that guy. One of my heroes. I support Elon Musk and I Iove Doge. He’s doing the right thing cutting out all the waste and abuse. I support both guys.”Bannon, meanwhile, became embroiled in controversy of his own. As he called on the audience to “fight, fight, fight”, he briefly held out a stiff arm in what appeared to be a fascist salute reminiscent of one made by Musk on inauguration day. In response, France’s far-right leader, Jordan Bardella, cancelled his CPAC appearance because “one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology”.View image in fullscreenBannon also used his typically fiery speech to float the idea of a constitutional change that would allow Trump to run for a third term as president, saying: “We want Trump in 28.”The case was also put at CPAC by Third Term Project, a thinktank exploring the case for reconsidering presidential term limits. Wearing a “Trump 2028” sticker, Amber Harris of Third Term Project said: “You need more than four years to enact some of the things he wants to do.”However, most CPAC attendees interviewed by the Guardian opposed the idea. Nina Golden, 47, from Raleigh, North Carolina, believes Trump is exceeding her expectations and is “100%” supportive of Musk but said: “I believe in the constitution as it is and it should stay that way.”Bannon, who served four months in prison last year for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection, hosted his influential War Room podcast from CPAC. He interviewed a group who had been imprisoned for attacking the US Capitol only to be pardoned by Trump on his first day in office.The “J6ers” received a heroes’ welcome at CPAC. Richard Barnett, who had put his feet on the House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk and was sentenced to more than four years in prison, revelled in his newfound celebrity by showing off his “certificate of pardon” from Trump.The 64-year-old retired firefighter, wearing a sweater emblazoned with “J6” and “political prisoner”, said of the president’s first month in office: “Awesome, baby. Keep it coming.”Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the far-right Oath Keepers, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy but had his 18-year sentence commuted, denied that his group had acted violently on behalf of Trump.Sporting a Trump tattoo on his arm, Rhodes, 59, from Granbury, Texas, said he was “very happy” with Trump, adding: “I got no complaints. His cabinet is fantastic from what I’ve seen so far. I love Doge. Let the sunlight come in and show all the corruption.”View image in fullscreenIn past years, CPAC has thrived on opposition to the status quo and targeted Democrats such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with crude insults. But with Trump installed in the White House, and Democrats weak and leaderless, targets were less obvious or conspicuous.Kari Lake, Trump’s nominee to be director of the Voice of America media outlet, observed: “For the past four years, we have been in a fight-fight-fight mode and now we are in a win-win-win mode.” Sebastian Gorka, a White House adviser, said he had expected anti-Trump protests and “pink pussy hat insanity” but “where are they? We crushed them.”Instead, energy was channeled into Trump worship. People sported Maga caps and other regalia; some even wore giant Trump face masks. Sparkly jackets were on sale with slogans such as “Make fries great again” and “Gulf of America”.The swagger also fuelled CPAC’s expansionist ambitions. The conference was addressed by far-right figures from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Hungary, Japan, North Macedonia, Poland, Slovakia and South Korea. Many saw Trump as a blueprint for nationalist populism in their own countries; some adopted the slogan “Make Europe great again”.Vance criticised Germany’s free-speech laws, accused European leaders of failing to control immigration and defended Trump’s negotiations with Vladimir Putin over the war in Ukraine.As for Musk, he waved around the chainsaw – which had the words “Long live freedom, damn it” written along its blade – after an interview in which he pushed falsehoods about Europe jailing people for memes, astronauts being left in space for political reasons and Democrats having an electoral incentive “to maximise the number of illegals in the country”.Finally, he was asked to paint a picture of the inside of the mind a genius. “My mind is a storm,” Musk replied. “It’s a storm.” More

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      Party of one: Donald Trump’s 75 minutes at CPAC talking about himself

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      God save the king. Drunk on power, Donald Trump spent Saturday afternoon before adoring fans, boasting of his victories, taunting his enemies and casting himself as America’s absolute monarch, supreme leader and divine emperor rolled into one.Trump’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland began with country singer Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA and raucous cheers in a crowded ballroom that included January 6 insurrectionists.Seventy-five minutes later, it concluded with the US president standing between two stars-and-stripes flags, pumping his fists and swaying to the Village People’s anthem YMCA.What emerged in between was a man who has never felt so sure of himself, so contemptuous of his foes and so convinced of his righteous mission to make America great again, even if it means breaking china, cracking skulls and leaving global destruction in his wake.As the title of Michael Wolff’s new book puts it, last November’s election was All or Nothing. Defeat meant ruin, disgrace and prison. Victory meant what Trump’s cheerleaders like to call the greatest comeback in political history. It also meant vengeance against his perceived tormentors in the justice department, Democratic party and media. As the martyr of Mar-a-Lago put it at CPAC two years ago: “I am your retribution.”The message he took from that win over Kamala Harris was that he had broken his opponents, broken the checks and balances and broken reality itself. He was invincible.“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus,” Cassius tells Brutus in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, “and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs and peep about/To find ourselves dishonorable graves.”This was the 15th time Trump has addressed CPAC, the biggest annual gathering of conservative activists. When he was out of power, his freewheeling speeches could be dismissed as the ravings – or “weavings” – of a madman. Even during his first term, his extremist rhetoric came with some expectation that the democratic guardrails would hold.But as America and the world have discovered during his first month back in the White House, Trump is unbound, unhinged and looking for blood. He took the stage at CPAC brimming with confidence and basking in chants of: “USA! USA!”The 78-year-old Florida resident describes his presidency as a game of golf in which he can match Arnold Palmer all the way: “If you golf, when you sink that first four-footer at the first hole, it gives you confidence, and then the next hole you sink another and now you go on to that third hole and by the time you get to the fifth hole you feel you can’t miss.”To be here was to live in a world turned upside down. Trump said: “For years, Washington was controlled by a sinister group of radical-left Marxists, war-mongers and corrupt special interests,” which would have been news to Karl Marx.But then, on 5 November, “we stood up to all the corrupt forces that were destroying America. We took away their power. We took away their confidence … and we took back our country.”Trump should in fact have won by a bigger margin, he claimed without evidence, but Democrats “cheated like hell” only to find his victory was “too big to rig”. Later, he revisited his 2020 loss, too, assuring conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell that “now it’s OK” to say the election was “rigged”.The president bragged about pardoning hundreds convicted of crimes in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, describing them as “political prisoners” and “J6 hostages”. Some of them were in the room, chanting “J6! J6!” and shouting “Thank you!”. They have gone from prison cells to being CPAC’s newest celebrities.Trump also boasted about killing diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, denying the identity of transgender people, yanking the US out of the Paris climate agreement and sending undocumented immigrants (“monsters”) to Guantánamo Bay. He hailed Elon Musk’s evisceration of the federal government, including the international aid agency USAid.Each time, the crowd cheered.Up until then, CPAC had felt toned down this year, with few if any chants of “Lock her up!” or T-shirts portraying Joe Biden as Satan. After all, Republicans won and there is no obvious Democratic leader to target. Still, that did not prevent Trump unleashing the usual insults and lies at his opponents.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen“Kamala,” he said, eliciting boos. “I haven’t heard that name in a while. Nobody ever knows her last name … But think of it, I was beating Joe badly and they changed him. Think of it, I’m the only one who had to beat two people.”The Biden presidency already feels like a millennium ago but Trump did not want his audience to forget, asking whether they preferred the nickname “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe”. For the record, “Crooked Joe” won.Trump mocked Biden’s golf handicap and bathing suit and offered a baseless opinion: “He was a sleepy, crooked guy. Terrible, terrible president. He was the worst president in the history of our country … Every single thing he touched turned to shit.”Such magnanimity!He took aim at the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren over her past claims of Native American ancestry, recycling the “Pocahontas” nickname he once gave her and jibing: “She does not like me. She’s a very angry person. You notice the way she is? She’s always screaming. She’s crazy.”And don’t get Trump started on liberal TV host Rachel Maddow: “I watch this MSNBC – which is a threat to democracy,actually – they’re stone-cold mean. But they’re stuttering. They’re all screwed up. They’re all mentally screwed up. They don’t know what – their ratings have gone down the tubes. I don’t even talk about CNN, CNN’s sort of like, I don’t know, they’re pathetic, actually.“This Rachel Maddow, what does she have? She’s got nothing. Nothing. She took a sabbatical where she worked one day a week. They paid her a lot of money. She gets no ratings. I should go against her in the ratings because, I’ll tell you, she gets no ratings. All she does is talk about Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. All different subjects: Trump this, Trump, that. But these people are really, I mean, they lie. They shouldn’t be allowed to lie every night. They are really a vehicle of the Democrat party.”Trump loves the rightwing media that populates CPAC, however. He smugly quoted conservative host Bill O’Reilly as saying that after four weeks Trump had become “the greatest president ever in the history of our country”, beating George Washington.O’Reilly was hardly alone this week in building an image of Trump as a superman who thinks sleep is for wimps. How do they love him? Let us count the ways.Dan Scavino, a Trump golf caddie turned White House deputy chief of staff, described his boss as “the greatest host in America”. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former White House press secretary, said Trump is “maybe the most popular human on the face of the planet right now”, adding: “He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t expect anyone to sleep either. He’s twice my age and has twice my energy.”Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, confirmed that Trump works 21 or 22 hours a day and, along with the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, confidently forecast that Trump would receive the Nobel peace prize for his capitulation to Vladimir Putin masterful negotiations with Russia and Ukraine.Border tsar Tom Homan called Trump “the greatest president of my lifetime”. Elise Stefanik, the US ambassador-designate to the United Nations, went one better by calling him “the greatest president in the history of our country”.And the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, whose home state of South Dakota includes the ripe-for-addition Mount Rushmore, topped them all by just coming out with it: “Our president wakes up every day knowing he’s the greatest president of all time.”When someone wakes up knowing that, when their self-aggrandisement is so monumental, they are like a golfer who believes they will never miss. But as Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine put it, Trump is living inside a disinformation bubble. The iron law of politics is that all bubbles burst. More

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      Trump preaches to the Maga choir at CPAC in campaign-style performance

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      In a campaign-style performance, Donald Trump delivered the more-than-hour-long finale at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, hitting familiar notes about his election victories, ending the war in Ukraine, US border militarization and what he characterized as the liberation of Washington from “deep-state bureaucrats”.Speaking to an auditorium filled to the brim at National Harbor in Maryland, Trump went all-in on his deployment of active-duty troops to the southern border, which he characterized as responding to an “invasion”. He also boasted that his administration had terminated temporary protected status for Haitian immigrants and attempted to ban birthright citizenship for children of non-legal permanent residents.“We’ve begun the largest deportation operation in American history,” Trump said.In one of several digressions, Trump portrayed his return to office as a victory over what he called a “sinister group of radical informers, war-mongers and corrupt special interests” whom he claimed had previously controlled Washington. The president reserved particular ire for media outlets, labeling MSNBC a “threat to democracy” and mocking Rachel Maddow, whose show is watched by more than 2 million viewers, for what he claimed were her low ratings.He also claimed Democrats had “lost their confidence” and possessed “the worst policy in history” while boasting about his administration’s first month in office.“Nobody has seen four weeks like we’ve had,” he said.Some of the other early moves he discussed included sweeping cuts to the federal workforce and regulations, baseless allegations of massive social security fraud, withdrawal from international climate agreements and the imposing of new tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico.He also addressed ongoing international conflicts, incorrectly claiming that US aid to Ukraine had exceeded European contributions, and saying the United States had sent $350bn to the war-torn country since the Russian invasion in 2022. That number isn’t close to the amount the US has allocated, with a government oversight office putting that estimate closer to $183bn. European nations have combined to contribute more.He noted the recent return of Israeli hostages while claiming that “Biden got back zero”, apparently forgetting that the US helped broker the return of 105 hostages in November 2023.The annual conference has become a key venue for Republican politicians to connect with conservative grassroots activists, though it’s clear the event has abandoned traditional GOP policies to fully embrace Trump’s Maga-centric approach.Several international conservative politicians attended the speech, including the Argentine president, Javier Milei, who is currently facing a widespread crypto scandal; the Polish president, Andrzej Duda; and the British Reform party leader, Nigel Farage, all praised by Trump during his remarks. More