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    Gavin Newsom’s Podcast Hosts Steve Bannon, Covering Musk, Trump and Taxes

    The California governor hosted one of the architects of President Trump’s political movement on his new podcast, and their friendly sparring revealed a few points of agreement.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is one of the most powerful Democrats in America, but this week he used his perch not to push back on the Trump administration but to instead podcast with an intellectual architect of the MAGA movement: Stephen K. Bannon.Their fast-paced, hourlong discussion was both good-natured and peppered with predictable disagreements. But the conversation revealed some curious policy overlap and potentially exposed each man’s views to supporters of the other.“This is part of the process to unwind you from being a globalist to make you a populist nationalist,” Mr. Bannon said. “It’s a long journey.”Mr. Newsom seemed amused: “This is part of the deprogramming, is it?”But Mr. Bannon didn’t so much use the opportunity to press Mr. Newsom on his positions as he did to advance his own perspective during their cursory coverage of some of the most complex issues facing the nation and the world.The podcast was the latest episode of “This Is Gavin Newsom,” a new show in which he has hosted several prominent conservatives. The Bannon conversation focused on economic issues, avoiding culture-war topics that dominated an earlier episode in which he broke with other leaders of his party in speaking out on transgender athletes.The tenor with Mr. Bannon was set early on, when Mr. Newsom did not push back on his guest’s repeated false claims that President Trump won the 2020 election. The governor does not appear to view the discussions as fact-checking sessions: He interjected only intermittently, including when Mr. Bannon referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas.”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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    Irish Leader to Visit Trump as Ties Between U.S. and Europe Are Tested

    President Trump will host Micheál Martin, the taoiseach or prime minister of Ireland, at the White House on Wednesday, for a traditional annual visit ahead of St. Patrick’s Day amid deepening tensions with Europe over tariffs and the war in Ukraine.The annual visit is seen as important to reinforce the longstanding diplomatic relationship between the two countries. But this one comes at a time when those ties are being tested — with European leaders announcing plans on Wednesday to hit back against American tariffs, tensions over the Trump administration’s approach to the war in Ukraine, and contentious statements the president has made about the United States developing and governing Gaza.And as recent visits with world leaders have shown, a stop by the White House, even a traditional one, now comes with the heightened risk of the unexpected playing out in front of cameras. There had been questions from the Irish public about whether Mr. Martin should attend at all after the disastrous meeting between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine earlier this month.Mr. Martin, an experienced statesman, had a breakfast meeting with Vice President JD Vance at his official residence, where the two smiled for photographers, both wearing green ties in a nod to the occasion.Speaking during the breakfast, Mr. Martin first thanked the president and vice president for continuing the annual tradition, before reflecting on the longstanding relationship between the two countries.“The United States has been a steadfast friend of Ireland’s for centuries,” he said, adding, “First and foremost, our kinship was built upon the ties between our people, especially the generations of Irish who made their homes here.”Mr. Martin is expected to be greeted by Mr. Trump before the leaders head to the Oval Office, and then the two will hold a closed-door bilateral meeting.According to Mr. Martin’s office, discussions were expected to cover a broad range of issues from trade to the war in Ukraine to the situation in the Middle East, as well as the Northern Ireland peace process, of which the United States has long been a crucial partner.On Wednesday evening, at around 5 p.m., the White House will hold a St. Patrick’s Day reception to mark the holiday commemorating the patron saint of Ireland, which is officially on Monday. Mr. Trump will be gifted a bowl of shamrocks, as is tradition.Ireland has a large trade surplus with the U.S. in goods — driven in large part by the export of pharmaceutical goods manufactured in Ireland by U.S. companies, as well as agricultural products like dairy — but it has a large trade deficit with the country when it comes to services. More

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    New Yorkers Protest as White House Defends Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia

    Hundreds of demonstrators marched downtown while a spokeswoman for President Trump said the president had the authority to detain Mahmoud Khalil.As hundreds of demonstrators made their way through Lower Manhattan on Tuesday to protest the detention of a prominent pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia University, the White House defended the arrest and rebuked the school for what it called lack of cooperation.The activist, Mahmoud Khalil, was a leader of student protests on Columbia’s campus and often served as a negotiator and spokesman. Mr. Khalil, 30, who is Palestinian and was born and raised in Syria, is a legal permanent resident of the United States and is married to an American citizen.He was arrested on Saturday and transferred to detention in Louisiana.A spokeswoman for President Trump, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the government had the authority to revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card under the Immigration and Nationality Act.“This is an individual who organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas,” she said.Her remarks came a day after Mr. Trump vowed that the apprehension of Mr. Khalil was “the first arrest of many to come.”Some free speech groups and civil rights activists have questioned the legality of Mr. Khalil’s detention, which his lawyers have challenged in court. On Tuesday, some New York Democrats expressed concern about the arrest. But Mayor Eric Adams shrugged off questions about it at a City Hall news conference, saying that the federal government, not the city, had authority over the matter.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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    Elon Musk Seeks to Put $100 Million Into Trump Political Operation

    Elon Musk has signaled to President Trump’s advisers in recent days that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump political operation, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.It is unheard-of for a White House staffer, even one with part-time status, to make such large political contributions to support the agenda of the boss. But there has never been someone in the direct employ of an administration like Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, who is leading Mr. Trump’s aggressive effort to shrink the federal government, the Department of Government Efficiency.Over the weekend, Mr. Musk traveled to and from Florida aboard Air Force One with Mr. Trump, and posted on his social media website, X, that he had dinner with Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday night after some tense interactions earlier in the week.And on Tuesday, as Mr. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, faced some violent protests around the globe, Mr. Trump made a display of having five Teslas brought to the White House grounds in a demonstration for the news media, and checked out the cars with Mr. Musk by his side. It was an extraordinary promotion of a company by the most powerful person in the federal government.“I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people,” Mr. Trump told reporters, referring to Mr. Musk. “And I just want people to know that he can’t be penalized for being a patriot.”Mr. Musk and White House officials didn’t return a request for comment.Associates of both Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have talked in recent days about Mr. Musk’s planned donation to a Trump-controlled entity. Mr. Musk has signaled he wants to make the donations not to his own super PAC, which is called America PAC and has spent heavily on Mr. Trump in the past, but to an outside entity affiliated with the president.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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    The U.S. Is Trying to Deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Legal Resident. Here’s What to Know.

    Mr. Khalil, who helped lead protests at Columbia University against high civilian casualties in Gaza, was arrested by immigration officers and sent to a detention center in Louisiana.The Trump administration invoked an obscure statute over the weekend in moving to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the United States who recently graduated from Columbia University, where he helped lead campus protests against high civilian casualties in Gaza during Israel’s campaign against Hamas.Mr. Khalil was arrested by immigration officers on Saturday and then sent to a detention center in Louisiana. On Monday, a federal judge in New York, Jesse M. Furman, ordered the federal government not to deport Mr. Khalil while he reviewed a petition challenging the legality of the detention.Here’s what to know about the administration’s attempt to deport Mr. Khalil.Who is the Columbia graduate?Mr. Khalil, 30, earned a master’s degree from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in December. He has Palestinian heritage and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.At Columbia last spring, Mr. Khali assumed a major role in student-led protests on campus against Israel’s war efforts in Gaza. He described his position as a negotiator and spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a pro-Palestinian group.What’s the legal basis for his arrest?The Trump administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.The provision says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”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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    Judge Orders U.S.A.I.D. and State Dept. to Pay Funds ‘Unlawfully’ Withheld

    A federal judge barred the Trump administration on Monday from “unlawfully impounding congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds” that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development owed to grant recipients and contractors, requiring it to pay for work completed in the first several weeks of President Trump’s term.The ruling, handed down by Judge Amir H. Ali of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, was the latest step in a winding dispute over foreign aid payments since Mr. Trump has tried to vastly shrink the nation’s foreign assistance. While forcing the administration to pay for work completed before Feb. 13, Judge Ali said the limits of the case prevented him from ordering payments on future work or restoring canceled contracts.But he left no doubt that he believed that the administration had exceeded its authority in trying to block funding, a warning that could echo through a deluge of lawsuits over Mr. Trump’s efforts to unilaterally halt spending.“Here, the executive has unilaterally deemed that funds Congress appropriated for foreign aid will not be spent,” he wrote. “The executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place.”The order on Monday prohibited the State Department and U.S.A.I.D. from implementing much of a Jan. 24 memorandum outlining plans to reorient and shrink U.S. foreign aid. It further required them to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars still owed to a constellation of groups for work completed before Feb. 13, as Judge Ali had ordered last month.The order dealt with a broad freeze on foreign aid funding that Mr. Trump put into effect the day he took office. It stopped short of the much more significant step of invalidating the Trump administration’s decision to cancel thousands of contracts through what it described as an expedited line-by-line review, after the lawsuit was already underway. Judge Ali found that the court was restrained to addressing the specific harms laid out in the lawsuit, not “supervision of discrete or ongoing executive decisions.”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’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic

    The president’s attack on the key tenet of the Biden administration’s industrial policy has set off concerns that he may claw back its funding.As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack, which he said was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.Eric Lee/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