Trump, Donald J

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      Musk Set to Get Access to Top-Secret U.S. Plan for Potential War With China

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      The Pentagon is scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military’s plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.Another official said the briefing will be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.Providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to President Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk’s conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.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 Offers $100 to Wisconsin Voters, Bringing Back a Controversial Tactic

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      By offering cash to voters who sign a petition opposing “activist judges,” Elon Musk’s super PAC can help identify conservative voters in a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.Elon Musk is bringing back his most controversial gambit from the 2024 presidential election: paying voters as part of a plan to identify and turn out conservative-leaning ones.The super PAC that Mr. Musk founded to funnel his fortune into Republican causes, America PAC, said on Thursday that it was offering $100 to registered voters in Wisconsin who sign a petition “in opposition to activist judges” or refer others to sign it. Mr. Musk has been using the group to spend millions of dollars to elect a conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an April 1 election.The petition reads: “Judges should interpret laws as written, not rewrite them to fit their personal or political agendas. By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role — interpreting, not legislating.”The purpose of the petition is multifaceted: Drive attention from the news media, increase awareness and voter registration among conservative voters, and help America PAC collect data on the most energized Wisconsinites who are likely to turn out for the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel. Mr. Musk carried out a nearly identical maneuver in battleground states before the November election, generating significant legal and political debate.The Philadelphia district attorney sued to stop the distribution of those lottery-style payouts, which went up to $1 million to voters who signed a document in support of the First Amendment. But the day before Election Day, a Pennsylvania judge declined to halt the sweepstakes.America PAC’s revival of the use of petitions, and the wording of its new document in Wisconsin, reveal two of Mr. Musk’s priorities as he wields wide power in Washington.The first is his focus on the court election in Wisconsin, which could swing control of the state’s top judicial body back to conservatives after liberals won a major victory there in 2023. Mr. Musk’s super PAC and an allied nonprofit group have spent over $11 million to try to elect Judge Schimel, which would again push the battleground state rightward on issues like redistricting and abortion rights.Mr. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, has also sued Wisconsin to challenge a state law prohibiting manufacturers from owning dealerships. In January, eight days after Tesla filed the suit, Mr. Musk wrote on X, “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud.”The second is Mr. Musk’s budding obsession with removing judges he sees as thwarting President Trump’s agenda. He posts daily on X about his frustrations with the federal judiciary, and the refreshed language of the new petition points to that focus.But despite the petition from Mr. Musk’s group denouncing judges who are openly political, there are few doubts about where the loyalties of his preferred candidate in Wisconsin lie: Judge Schimel is a longtime defender of Mr. Trump who dressed up as the president last Halloween. More

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      ‘It Sounds Strange, Doesn’t It?’ Trump Muses About Gutting the Education Dept.

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      President Trump signed the executive order in the East Room of the White House, which was packed with jittery children.It seemed as if the president just needed a little reassurance.He was in the East Room of the White House, which was packed with jittery children, conservative activists, influencers and six Republican governors, from Florida, Texas, Virginia, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa. All had come to watch him sign an executive order to gut the Education Department, something conservatives have dreamed of doing for decades. No other president had done it, not even this one the first time he was in office.Now he was back, and there was the order, sitting atop a small desk at the front of that grandiose room, waiting to be signed.All around his desk were lots of other little desks, the kind you sit at in grade school. Children of varying ages, dressed in school uniforms, sat swinging their legs under their desks. They looked up expectantly as Mr. Trump approached.He turned to one small boy and said, “Should I do this?” The boy nodded eagerly. The president spun around and looked at a young girl. “Should I do it?” he asked. She nodded, too.Encouraged, he sat down, pulled out his power pen and scrawled. The governors and the children and their parents burst into applause.In some sense, Thursday’s executive order signing was on-brand for Mr. Trump. Whether he’s releasing files related to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, purging the board of the Kennedy Center to appoint himself its head, or carving up the Education Department, this president takes pride in doing what none of the others would dare do.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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      AOC Puts Her Own Spin on Bernie Sanders’s Pitch at Las Vegas Rally

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      The two progressive leaders, one young and one old, are touring Western cities with a similar message but a key difference in how they sell it.Even as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has fired up the American left over the past decade, his speeches have the flavor of a sociology lesson. He rarely makes himself the main character.Which is why it is striking how differently the young leader often seen as his successor, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, approaches politics.As she kicked off a Western tour with Mr. Sanders on Thursday in North Las Vegas, Nev., she introduced herself by name — which he never does — and used her experience waitressing to explain her politics to a crowd of several thousand people.“I don’t believe in health care, labor and human dignity because I’m a Marxist — I believe it because I was a waitress,” she said. “Because I worked double shifts to keep the lights on and because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind. And I know that we don’t have to live like this.”Mr. Sanders, by contrast, delivered a version of the same speech he has given since before Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was born, railing against corporate greed. “Eat the rich,” someone yelled.Unlike Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mr. Sanders rarely injects his personal story, including his middle-class roots, into his speeches.Mikayla Whitmore 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

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      Trump Administration Delays Requirement for Companies to Track Tainted Food

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      A law passed in 2011 required food companies to track food in the event of contamination and a recall. The administration delayed the move, set to take effect next year, for 30 months.The Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday that it would delay by 30 months a requirement that food companies and grocers rapidly trace contaminated food through the supply chain and pull it off the shelves.Intended to “limit food-borne illness and death,” the rule required companies and individuals to maintain better records to identify where foods are grown, packed, processed or manufactured. It was set to go into effect in January 2026 as part of a landmark food safety law passed in 2011, and was advanced during President Trump’s first term.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, has expressed interest in chemical safety in food, moving to ban food dyes and on Thursday debuting a public database where people can track toxins in foods. But other actions in the first months of the Trump administration have undercut efforts to tackle bacteria and other contaminants in food that have sickened people. The administration’s cutbacks included shutting down the work of a key food-safety committee and freezing the spending on credit cards of scientists doing routine tests to detect pathogens in food.There were several high-profile outbreaks in recent years, including the cases last year linked to deadly listeria in Boar’s Head meat and E. coli in onions on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders.The postponement raised alarms among some advocacy organizations on Thursday.“This decision is extremely disappointing and puts consumers at risk of getting sick from unsafe food because a small segment of the industry pushed for delay, despite having 15 years to prepare,” said Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, an advocacy group.Many retailers have already taken the steps to comply with the rule. Still, trade groups for the food industry lobbied to delay implementation of the rule in December, according to The Los Angeles Times.In a letter to President Trump in December, food makers and other corporate trade groups cited a number of regulations that they said were “strangling our economy.” They asked for the food traceability rule to be pared back and delayed.“This is a huge step backward for food safety,” said Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. “What’s so surprising about it is this was a bipartisan rule.”Ms. Sorscher said there was broad support for the measure, since it would protect consumers and businesses, which could limit the harm, the reputational damage and the cost of a food recall with a high-tech supply chain. More

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      Trump’s Judicial Defiance Is New to the Autocrat Playbook, Experts Say

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      The president’s escalating conflict with federal courts goes beyond what has happened in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where leaders spent years remaking the judiciary.President Trump’s intensifying conflict with the federal courts is unusually aggressive compared with similar disputes in other countries, according to scholars. Unlike leaders who subverted or restructured the courts, Mr. Trump is acting as if judges were already too weak to constrain his power.“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”There are many examples of autocratic leaders constraining the power of the judiciary by packing courts with compliant judges, or by changing the laws that give them authority, he said. But it is extremely rare for leaders to simply claim the power to disregard or override court orders directly, especially so immediately after taking office.In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has purged thousands of judges from the judiciary as part of a broader effort to consolidate power in his own hands. But that required decades of effort and multiple constitutional changes, Mr. Levitsky said. It only became fully successful after a failed 2016 coup provided a political justification for the purge.In Hungary, Prime Minister Victor Orban packed the constitutional courts with friendly judges and forced hundreds of others into retirement, but did so over a period of years, using constitutional amendments and administrative changes.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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      Touring Kennedy Center, Trump Mused on His Childhood ‘Aptitude for Music’

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      During his first visit to the Kennedy Center since making himself the chairman of its board, President Trump had a lot to say about Broadway shows, dancers in silk tights, the Potomac River and Elvis Presley.But in a private discussion at the start of a meeting of the center’s board on Monday, Mr. Trump offered something he usually steers away from in bigger settings: a personal anecdote about his childhood.He told the assembled board members that in his youth he had shown special abilities in music after taking aptitude tests ordered by his parents, according to three participants in the meeting.He could pick out notes on the piano, he told the board members, some of whom he’s known for years and others who are relatively new to him. But the president said that his father, Fred Trump, was not pleased by his musical abilities, according to the participants, and that he had never developed his talent. One person in the room said Mr. Trump appeared to be joking about his father. “I have a high aptitude for music,” he said at one point, according to people at the meeting. “Can you believe that?”“That’s why I love music,” he added. Mr. Trump’s remarks have not been previously reported. They were not part of an audio recording of the board meeting obtained by The New York Times earlier this week.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 Is Said to Sign Order Aimed at Dismantling Education Department

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      President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Thursday instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling the agency, according to two White House officials.The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress, which created it. But the Trump administration has already taken steps to narrow the agency’s authority and significantly cut its work force while telegraphing plans to try to shutter it.The White House officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans, said the order instructed Ms. McMahon to return authority over education to the states.USA Today was first to report Mr. Trump’s intent to sign the order on Thursday. Republican attempts to shutter the agency date back to the 1980s. But the push gained steam in recent years after a parents’ rights movement grew out of a backlash to school policies and shutdowns during the coronavirus pandemic.That movement, which includes key pro-Trump, grass-roots activists, expanded around opposition to progressive agendas that promoted mandating certain education standards and inclusive policies for L.G.B.T.Q. students. Activists contended that these policies undermined parental rights and values.But the hyper-partisanship around education issues has been present for decades, from progressive-leaning teachers’ unions who organized against President George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policies to conservative Republican presidential candidates in 2016 who ran against the Common Core standards elevated by President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program.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