Trump, Donald J

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      Trump Administration Threatens to Withhold Funds From Public Schools

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      The Trump administration threatened on Thursday to withhold federal funding from public schools unless state education officials verified the elimination of all programs that it said unfairly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion.In a memo sent to top public education officials across the country, the Education Department said that funding for schools with high percentages of low-income students, known as Title I funding, was at risk pending compliance with the administration’s directive.The memo included a certification letter that state and local school officials must sign and return to the department within 10 days, even as the administration has struggled to define which programs would violate its interpretation of civil rights laws. The move is the latest in a series of Education Department directives aimed at carrying out President Trump’s political agenda in the nation’s schools.At her confirmation hearing in February, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools should be allowed to celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But she was more circumspect when asked whether classes that focused on Black history ran afoul of Mr. Trump’s agenda and should be banned.“I’m not quite certain,” Ms. McMahon said, “and I’d like to look into it further.”More recently, the Education Department said that an “assessment of school policies and programs depends on the facts and circumstances of each case.”Programs aimed at recognizing historical events and contributions and promoting awareness would not violate the law “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote.“However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate,” the Education Department said.It also noted that the Justice Department could sue for breach of contract if it found that federal funds were spent while violating civil rights laws.The federal government accounts for about 8 percent of local school funding, but the amounts vary widely. In Mississippi, for example, about 23 percent of school funding comes from federal sources, while just 7 percent of school funding in New York comes from Washington, according to the Pew Research Center.“Federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” Craig Trainor, the acting assistant education secretary for civil rights, said in a statement. “When state education commissioners accept federal funds, they agree to abide by federal anti-discrimination requirements.” More

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      Javier Milei, Trump’s ‘Favorite President,’ Has Few Deals to Offer — but Lots of Adoration

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      Javier Milei of Argentina might not be that useful for the United States on economics or geopolitics — but he can help to fight the culture wars.The day after President Trump antagonized world leaders across the globe with his most sweeping set of tariffs yet, he was scheduled to fly to Florida and potentially see the one leader he has called his “favorite president.”That leader, President Javier Milei of Argentina, had flown overnight to receive an award on Thursday at a right-wing gala at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump was scheduled to also be there late Thursday — Mr. Milei said Mr. Trump would receive an award, too — and Mr. Milei said he hoped the two would meet.It was Mr. Milei’s 10th trip to the United States in 15 months as president, and nearly every time, he has met Mr. Trump or Elon Musk.Mr. Trump has posited that he is reshuffling U.S. foreign policy strictly around what is good for the United States.So what can be puzzling about his elevation of Argentina to the front row of America’s allies — Mr. Milei and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy were the only world leaders onstage at Mr. Trump’s inauguration — is that the chronically distressed South American nation is not particularly important as an economic or geopolitical partner.Instead, through Mr. Milei, Argentina has offered Mr. Trump something else he appears to crave: adoration.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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      Americans’ Reaction to Trump’s Tariffs Range From Worried to Enthusiastic

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      President Trump’s announcement of sweeping universal and so-called reciprocal tariffs on countries around the world drew a swift rebuke on Wednesday from business groups, trade experts, Democratic lawmakers and many economists who warned that they would raise prices for American consumers and slow economic growth.“This is catastrophic for American families,” said Matt Priest, president and chief executive of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America. “We had hoped the president would take a more targeted approach, but these broad tariffs will only drive-up costs, reduce product quality and weaken consumer confidence.”Other reactions were more muted, and some positive, saying the move was long overdue.“Today is arguably the single greatest trade and economic policy action in the history of the country, and it absolutely cements President Trump’s legacy that he is trying to usher in a new golden age of economy production and prosperity,” said Nick Iacovella, executive vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a group that supports tariffs. He said the tariffs would contribute to “broadly re-industrializing the United States and creating working class jobs.”Mr. Trump insisted on Wednesday that experts had been wrong all along about his tariffs and that the anxiety about them now was misplaced. But those who will be forced to pay the tariffs were quick to raise concerns about the move, which will increase import taxes on products from some of America’s biggest trading partners including China, the European Union, Japan and India.The National Retail Federation said in a statement that the tariffs would “equal more anxiety and uncertainty for American businesses and consumers.” Tariffs are not paid for by foreign countries or suppliers but by U.S. importers, they said. They also added that “the immediate implementation of these tariffs is a massive undertaking and requires both advance notice and substantial preparation by the millions of U.S. businesses that will be directly impacted.”The National Association of Manufacturers said it was still parsing the details and exact implications of the president’s tariffs. But the group’s president, Jay Timmons, said in a statement that the high costs of new tariffs threatened “investment, jobs, supply chains and, in turn, America’s ability to outcompete other nations and lead as the pre-eminent manufacturing superpower.”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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      Musk’s Task Force Begins Shutting Down Foreign Policy Research Center

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      The head of the Wilson Center, a storied foreign policy think tank, resigned on Tuesday, a day after employees from Elon Musk’s government-overhauling team arrived at the group’s Washington headquarters to dismantle it, according to people familiar with the actions at the center.The resignation of the president, Mark Green, a Republican, and the visit from Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, indicated that the Trump administration was carrying out an executive order President Trump signed last month directing that the organization, a nonpartisan policy group, be largely dismantled.After DOGE team members visited the center on Monday and Tuesday, some of the leadership staff and senior government employees were ousted, including Mr. Green, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution by political appointees in the Trump administration. The center’s dozens of federal employees, about a third of its work force, were also set to be placed on administrative leave.The apparent gutting of the Wilson Center would be the latest attempt by the Trump administration to bring federally funded institutions that have historically been independent under executive branch control, and in much diminished forms. Mr. Musk and his task force have helped lead efforts at slashing those institutions and various federal agencies.One person familiar with Mr. Green’s resignation said he had been offered a choice: Step down or be fired. Mr. Green, who has been a Wisconsin congressman, an ambassador to Tanzania and head of the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development during Mr. Trump’s first term, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.Ryan McKenna, a spokesman for the Wilson Center, said on Wednesday that the center had no comment on Mr. Green’s resignation or DOGE’s visits. The White House declined to comment.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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      House Republicans Demand Documents About ActBlue Departures

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      Republicans began investigating ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s main fund-raising platform, last year in part of a broader bid to target key Democratic organizations.The leaders of three Republican-led House committees accused ActBlue, the main Democratic fund-raising platform, of complacency in fraud prevention and demanded more information about the recent resignations of a raft of top executives.“ActBlue’s internal turmoil, lack of a functioning legal team, possible retaliatory actions and failure to take fraud seriously raise a host of new questions about the platform’s ability to deter fraud and comply with legal requirements,” the chairmen of the House Judiciary, Oversight and Administration committees wrote in a four-page letter on Wednesday.The Republican chairmen specifically demanded documents related to the resignation of officials in the general counsel’s office of ActBlue, which were first reported last month by The New York Times. Republicans began investigating ActBlue last year, and the efforts are part of a broader bid to target key pieces of the Democratic political infrastructure.The committee chairmen, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, James Comer of Kentucky and Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, also demanded testimony from two ActBlue employees whose names were redacted from a copy of the letter posted online.The letter accompanied an interim staff report that was released on Wednesday, along with nearly 500 pages of internal ActBlue documents, accusing the nonprofit of “a fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention.”Megan Hughes, a spokeswoman for ActBlue, said in a statement: “As we have historically done, ActBlue will continue to respond to requests from the House committees.”The interim report from Republicans on the Judiciary, Oversight and Administration committees accused ActBlue of having “lowered its fraud-prevention standards” in 2024, pointing to, among other examples, a fraud specialist citing an annual goal that included “D.E.I. work.” While the report accused the company of opening the door to fraud, it did not contain any notable new examples but rather said the documents that it had “paint a picture of complacency.”The turmoil at ActBlue was set off in late February when two unions that represent its staff members wrote a letter to ActBlue’s board warning that the departures of the lawyers in the firm’s general counsel’s office had left the remaining employees facing legal risk for their actions.It remains unclear what instigated so many sudden departures from ActBlue. None of the officials who left the company have agreed to be interviewed on the record.But the tumult and the congressional investigation come at a perilous moment for ActBlue and the Democratic candidates and causes that rely on it to process their fund-raising. Republicans at the Capitol and in the Trump administration are vying to cripple mechanisms Democrats rely on for finances and communications.When a phone-banking system Democrats use went down briefly last weekend during the final get-out-the-vote period before Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, some Democrats fretted that it could have been sabotaged by the political right, and then worried anew about the potential of Elon Musk’s buying Democratic tech firms in order to shut them down. More

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      How a Black Progressive Transformed Into a Conservative Star

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      In the summer of 2020, Xaviaer DuRousseau was preparing to appear on a Netflix reality show called “The Circle,” where a group of strangers, isolated in separate apartments, compete for a cash prize and occasionally adopt fake digital personas to trick one another.Mr. DuRousseau, then 23, was a progressive who marched in Black Lives Matter protests, had pushed his university to require ethnic studies courses as a graduation requirement and voted for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016. For the TV show, producers wanted Mr. DuRousseau, a Black man, to pose as a white woman and lecture others about racial injustice, before revealing his true identity.Mr. DuRousseau spent hours boning up on right-wing politics to get ready for debates with conservative contestants.But as he watched videos from PragerU, the conservative advocacy group, and Candace Owens, a right-wing influencer, he found himself nodding along.Maybe, he began to think, the media really was targeting President Trump for taking on the political establishment. Maybe free college and free health care were unrealistic goals, despite what Mr. Sanders said. Maybe police brutality against Black people was less common than he thought.“I was getting so frustrated, because I kept agreeing with some of the stuff that they were saying,” he said. “I just kept debunking myself, over and over.”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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      How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul

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      For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.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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      Susan Crawford Wins Wisconsin Supreme Court Election, Despite Elon Musk’s Millions

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      Susan Crawford defeated Brad Schimel for a State Supreme Court seat in a race that shattered spending records and maintained a liberal majority on the court.Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, overcame $25 million in spending from Elon Musk and defeated her conservative opponent, The Associated Press reported, in a totemic contest that became a critical test of the nation’s prevailing political winds.Judge Crawford, who serves in Dane County, handily defeated Judge Brad Schimel of Waukesha County, who ran on his loyalty to President Trump and was powered by record spending in the race from Mr. Musk, the president’s billionaire policy aide. The barrage of spending in the race may nearly double the previous record for a single judicial election. With over 70 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 10 points.“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” she said in her victory speech on Tuesday night. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”For Democrats, the result is a jolt of momentum. They have been engaged in a coast-to-coast rhetorical rending of garments since Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January and embarked with Mr. Musk on an effort to drastically shrink federal agencies, set aside international alliances and alter the government’s relationships with the nation’s universities, minority groups, immigrants and corporate world.Coming on the heels of Democratic triumphs in special elections for state legislative seats in Iowa and Pennsylvania and the defeat of four Republican-backed state referendums in Louisiana, Judge Crawford’s victory puts the party on its front foot for the first time since last November. Her win showed that, at least in one instance, Mr. Musk’s seemingly endless reserves of political cash had energized more Democrats than Republicans.The victory for Judge Crawford maintains a 4-to-3 majority for liberals on the court, which in coming months is poised to deliver key decisions on abortion and labor rights.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesWe 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