Trump, Donald J

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      Trump’s Dressing Down of Zelensky Plays Into Putin’s War Aims

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      President Trump says he wants a quick cease-fire in Ukraine. But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appears to be in no rush, and the blowup on Friday between Mr. Trump and Ukraine’s president may give Russia’s leader the kind of ammunition he needs to prolong the fight.With the American alliance with Ukraine suffering a dramatic, public rupture, Mr. Putin now seems even more likely to hold out for a deal on his terms — and he could even be tempted to expand his push on the battlefield.The extraordinary scene in Washington — in which Mr. Trump lambasted President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — was broadcast as the top story on state television in Russia on Saturday morning. It played into three years of Kremlin propaganda casting Mr. Zelensky as a foolhardy ruler who would sooner or later exhaust the patience of his Western backers.For the Kremlin, perhaps the most important message came in later remarks by Mr. Trump, who suggested that if Ukraine did not agree to a “cease-fire now,” the war-torn country would have to “fight it out” without American help.That could set up an outcome that Mr. Putin has long sought, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives: a dominant position over Ukraine and wide-ranging concessions from the West.In fact, Mr. Trump’s professed attempts to end the war quickly could intensify and prolong it, experts warned. If the United States is really ready to abandon Ukraine, Mr. Putin could try to seize more Ukrainian territory and end up with more leverage if and when peace talks ultimately take place.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 ‘Gold Card’ Set Off Panic in an Unexpected Place: Real Estate

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      The president initially said his $5 million green card alternative would replace a visa for foreign investors that has become a favorite financing tool of major developers.President Trump’s plan to sell green cards for $5 million each, a program he is calling a “gold card,” has largely been met with a shrug. It’s not clear exactly how the program would work, if it’s legal or how many potential immigrants would really pay $5 million for a path to U.S. citizenship.But in a niche area of dealmaking, alarm bells are blaring.Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, said on Tuesday that the plan to effectively sell green cards would replace the EB-5 investor visa, a favorite source of funding for major real estate projects.Massive developments — from New York’s Hudson Yards to the San Francisco Shipyard to, yes, Trump Plaza in Jersey City — have been financed in part by overseas investors applying to the EB-5 program, which grants permanent U.S. residence. Such investors are motivated by a green card, not by maximizing returns, and so for developers their capital tends to be less expensive than borrowing money from a typical commercial lender.The real estate company owned by the family of Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner Capital, drew scrutiny for its use of EB-5 funding during the first Trump administration.Overall, the EB-5 program does not bring in a lot of money — about $4 billion last year in the context of the $28 trillion U.S. economy — but it represents a huge profit bump for a small but powerful political contingency: major real estate developers. They are not likely to see EB-5 killed without a fight.“Cheap capital is the crack cocaine to the real estate industry and probably every other industry,” said Matt Gordon, the C.E.O. of E3iG, which advises both foreign investment-based visa applicants and U.S. companies seeking funding.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 Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign Policy

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      The journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.The New York TimesThe Dark Heart of Trump’s Foreign PolicyThe journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the worldview emerging from Trump’s foreign policy decisions regarding Ukraine, Gaza, China and beyond.This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.What is the Donald Trump doctrine? What is Donald Trump’s foreign policy?I think the place to begin to try to untangle what we’ve actually seen is to listen to the way Trump and Vice President JD Vance speak about our allies.Archived clip of Donald Trump: I’ve had very good talks with Putin, and I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine. They don’t have any cards, but they play it tough.Archived clip of JD Vance: The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.Archived clip of Donald Trump: I mean, look, let’s be honest: The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it, but now I’m president.Something is new here. The Trump doctrine that we’ve seen in the first month of this presidency is going to reshape the world much more fundamentally than Trump did in the four years of his first term. That’s in part because of who is around him now — JD Vance and Elon Musk, instead of the foreign policy establishment.So I wanted to have a bigger picture conversation about what this Trump doctrine is. I’m joined today by Fareed Zakaria, the host of “Fareed Zakaria GPS” on CNN, a Washington Post columnist and the author of the best-selling book, “Age of Revolutions.”This episode contains strong language.Ezra Klein: Fareed Zakaria, welcome back to the show.Fareed Zakaria: Always a pleasure, Ezra.To the extent you feel you can define it, what’s the Trump doctrine?Part of the problem with Trump is that he is so mercurial. He’s so idiosyncratic that, just when you think you figured out the Trump doctrine, he goes and says something that kind of sounds like the opposite of the Trump doctrine.But I do think that there is one coherent worldview that Trump seems to espouse and has espoused for a long time. The first ad he took out when he was a real estate developer was in 1987. It was an ad about how Japan was ripping us off economically and Europe was ripping us off by free-riding on security. And what that represents, fundamentally, is a rejection of the open international system that the United States and Europe have built over the last eight decades.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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      Homeland Security Officials Push I.R.S. for 700,000 Immigrants’ Addresses

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      The tax collector has so far denied the request because of concerns it violates taxpayer privacy laws.The Department of Homeland Security has pushed the Internal Revenue Service to turn over the addresses of roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants it is seeking to deport, according to three people familiar with the matter, in a request that could violate taxpayer privacy laws.I.R.S. officials have so far denied the department’s attempts to verify the addresses, the people said, because of the legal concerns. But the request is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to enlist the tax collector in its plans for mass deportations.Many undocumented immigrants file tax returns with the I.R.S., giving the agency information about where they live, their families, their employers and their earnings. The I.R.S. gives immigrants without Social Security numbers a separate nine-digit code called an individual tax payer identification number to file their returns.Taxpayer information is typically kept closely held at the I.R.S., with improper disclosure barred under federal law. I.R.S. officials have told their Department of Homeland Security counterparts that they need to follow rules governing taxpayer privacy, the people familiar with the matter said.Representatives for the I.R.S. and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Washington Post reported earlier on the request.The request is a sign of the lengths Trump administration officials are trying to go to deport millions of immigrants in the United States illegally. Administration officials are preparing to create a registry listing migrants and are using military sites to help deport them.The Trump administration has repeatedly sought access to taxpayer information at the I.R.S. in ways that officials at the tax agency have worried could violate federal law. The agency recently signed an agreement allowing a member of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to view anonymized taxpayer data as part of a push to modernize the agency’s software. The Musk team is leading an effort to shrink federal programs and the government’s work force.The Department of Homeland Security had previously tried to enlist I.R.S. agents in its broad immigration crackdown, asking for agents to audit companies that might be hiring unauthorized immigrants, according to a copy of a memo viewed by The New York Times. President Trump has also suggested that I.R.S. agents could be sent to the border with Mexico.The requests have added to the tumult at an agency that is already reeling. The I.R.S. has been hit with more than 7,000 layoffs under the Trump administration so far, and its acting commissioner, Doug O’Donnell, stepped down on Friday, the second resignation at the top in little more than a month.Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk have both suggested that the I.R.S. should be abolished. More

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      F.B.I. Returns Materials Taken From Mar-a-Lago to Trump

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      Among the items taken from the president’s Florida residence were files that investigators said contained classified material and formed the central evidence in one of the criminal cases against him.The F.B.I. on Friday gave President Trump the boxes of materials the bureau had seized during a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in 2022, the White House announced.Files that investigators said contained classified material were among the thousands of items taken in the search, and they had formed the central evidence in a criminal case charging Mr. Trump with illegally taking them when he left office after his first term and blocking the government’s efforts to retrieve them.But a judge unexpectedly threw out the charges last year, and prosecutors dropped their appeal to reinstate them after Mr. Trump was re-elected in November. Jack Smith, the special counsel in the case, said at the time that the charges had been dismissed because of a department policy that barred filing charges against a sitting president.Mr. Trump repeatedly argued that he had a legal right to the documents despite their classification. After the case was dropped, the president and his allies said they would seek the return of the files that had been seized.Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said that happened Friday afternoon.“The F.B.I. is giving the president his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids,” Mr. Cheung said. “We are taking possession of the boxes today and loading them onto Air Force One.”Mr. Cheung told reporters that the boxes of materials taken from Mar-a-Lago were loaded onto Air Force One before the president’s departure for Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening. Alina Habba, the counselor to the president, told reporters that the boxes included personal items from Mr. Trump and his family.In his own statement, the president said he wanted to make the materials “part of the Trump Presidential Library.”“The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes that deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about,” he said, adding, “I did absolutely nothing wrong.” More

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      Trump Sums Up His Zelensky Showdown: ‘This Is Going to Be Great Television’

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      One of the most surreal moments of Friday’s Oval Office showdown between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came at the very end.After all the shouting and the saber-rattling and the lecturing and the pleading and the politicking had ceased, the American president shifted a little in his seat and shared an observation.“This is going to be great television,” he remarked. “I will say that.”It was a conclusion as startling as it was fundamentally Trumpian.This was not a season finale boardroom scene of “The Apprentice” that had just taken place. It was the highest of high-stakes talks — one that could determine the fate of millions, the existence of a sovereign nation and the security of a continent — going wildly off the rails.But for Mr. Trump, one thing that was on his mind, as always, was the ratings. He sounded almost excited by the drama of the spectacle, as though he could feel the front pages of the world’s newspapers being written in real time.This is a man who spent years yelling at people on TV as a way to make a living. He is wired to think about things in terms of “great television.” He is a highly conscious performer. But playacting as a tough guy on NBC on Thursday nights between 9 and 10 p.m. is not the same thing as bossing around an ally before the eyes of the world, even if Mr. Trump uses the same language to describe one performance as he would the other.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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      Flow of U.S. Weapons to Ukraine Has Nearly Stopped and May End Completely

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      President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine entered the White House for a meeting with President Donald Trump on Friday knowing that the flow of weapons and military hardware from the United States to his country had essentially stopped.By the time he left, after a televised argument between the two leaders, the situation appeared even more dire.As the two men met, it had been 50 days since the Pentagon had announced a new package of weapons to Ukraine and the new administration had said little about providing any more.A Trump administration official said later on Friday that all U.S. aid to Ukraine — including the final shipments of ammunition and equipment authorized and paid for during the Biden administration — could be canceled imminently.After Russia’s full-scale invasion of that country in February 2022, such shipments of military hardware from the United States were announced roughly every two weeks during the Biden administration, and sometimes just five or six days apart.According to the Pentagon, about $3.85 billion remains of what Congress authorized for additional withdrawals from the Defense Department’s stockpile. A former senior defense official from the Biden administration said the last of the arms Ukraine had purchased from U.S. defense companies would be shipped within the next six months.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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      Several Lawsuits Target the Lack of Transparency in Elon Musk’s DOGE

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      The lack of transparency surrounding the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is emerging as a target in the courts.Elon Musk likes to talk about transparency. But a major story my colleagues published today shows how he baked secrecy into his Department of Government Efficiency from the start.When devising a plan to overhaul the federal bureaucracy, Musk and his advisers deliberately designed an organizational structure that they thought would be outside the purview of federal public records laws, my colleagues wrote:The operation would take over the U.S. Digital Service, which had been housed within the Office of Management and Budget, and would become a stand-alone entity in the executive office of the president. Mr. Musk would not be named the DOGE administrator, but rather an adviser to Mr. Trump in the White House.White House advisers, unlike employees at other departments in the executive branch, are covered under executive privilege and typically do not have to disclose their emails or records immediately.Now that secrecy is emerging as a key legal target in the courts.Several lawsuits filed in recent weeks are pushing the administration to be more transparent about Musk’s and his initiative’s activities. They argue that the administration is violating the nation’s public records laws, and in some cases they are essentially asking judges to determine that the department is an agency that’s subject to those laws.“These lawsuits are essentially saying you can’t have an agency that’s this powerful, that’s making these enormous decisions, that’s also entirely secret and cut off from the public,” said Jonathan Shaub, a law professor at the University of Kentucky who advised President Biden on matters of executive privilege.That privilege is vast, and entities like the National Security Council have successfully drawn protections from it by arguing that their officials simply advise the president, who makes the final decisions. Some legal experts think that could be a harder case to make about the Department of Government Efficiency.It could all turn on the question of how much power Musk really has — an issue that came up in a hearing in another lawsuit in Washington today — and what his department really is.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