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      Trump plans to sign executive order to rename Pentagon to ‘Department of War’ – as it happened

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      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will return on Friday. Among the day’s developments:

      The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.

      Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.

      Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “department of war”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

      Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.

      As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.

      The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.

      New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
      As we reported earlier, during a contentious Senate hearing on Thursday, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was asked twice whether he agreed with Retsef Levi, an MIT professor the secretary appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), who has said that mRNA Covid vaccines “cause serious harm including death, especially among young people”.Kennedy said that he did agree with that statement, which Levi made in a video he posted on his X account in 2023, and has pinned at the top to this day.“I am filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time all Covid mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video, “because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level[s] of harm, including the death of young people and children.”Levi, who is Israeli, cited what he called evidence for this conclusion based on his reading of statistics from Israel’s EMS during its vaccination program in 2021. But he offered no scientific or medical evidence to support his claim, which is a fringe view not shared by the overwhelming majority or vaccine experts and medical doctors.It is worth stressing that both of the senators who asked Kennedy about that expert’s claim – Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator – referred to the new vaccine advisory board member as “Dr Levi”. That might have led some viewers to assume that Levi is a medical doctor, but he is not. He is a professor at MIT’s school of management, with a doctorate in operations research and no expertise in the science of infectious diseases or vaccines.It is unclear how Levi’s background qualifies him for a position on a vaccine panel responsible for making vaccine recommendations and whose members are supposed to be “medical and public health experts”.Donald Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.On his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk responded to a question about why he was not at the White House by writing: “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”Musk did not say who his representative was, but one of the guests was Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, until his nomination was withdrawn as Musk’s relations with Trump frayed.Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”As Donald Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, his labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, all have primary-residence mortgages on at least two properties, according to financial disclosure forms, real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media to ProPublica.Real estate experts told the non-profit investigative outlet that claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.But Trump has called for the prosecution of Cook, the Biden-nominated central banker, for allegedly having multiple primary-residence mortgages, and leveled the same charge against Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought a successful civil fraud case against Trump.Two days after an appeals court reinstated a Democratic member of Federal Trade Commission, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge, the justice department asked the supreme court to let Trump remove her again as the legal battle continues.The commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter, posted an image of herself back at work on Thursday, with the caption: “Back at my desk, back online, and have already moved to reinstitute the Click to Cancel Rule. Hope a majority of the Commission will join me – all Americans deserve to be protected from abusive subscription traps.”The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was adopted in October after the agency received more than 16,000 comments from consumers enraged about having to jump through hoops to cancel their enrollments.Implementation of the rule was delayed by the FTC in May, two months after Trump removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner.A federal appeals court vacated the rule on procedural grounds in July, just days before it was set to go into effect. Seven Democratic senators wrote to the new FTC chair that month, urging him to have the commission fix the procedural flaws identified by the court and reissue the rule.Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, just rejected Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claim, during a contentious senate hearing on Thursday, that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies.In an account of her firing published on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Monarez wrote that, at a meeting with Kennedy on 25 August:
      I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.
      When Kennedy was confronted with that accusation by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, at the Senate hearing, he denied that he gave Monarez that order.“No, I did not say that to her, Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her”, he added. “So there are witnesses to every meeting that we had, and all of those witnesses will say I never said that.”Kennedy was not asked if anyone else at the meeting did issue such an order to Monarez, which would be consistent with her account.Instead, Wyden asked Kennedy if Monarez was “lying today to the Wall Street Journal and the American people”.“Yes sir”, Kennedy replied.In a statement responding to Kennedy’s testimony, Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote: “Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she wrote in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions.”Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have already called for Monarez to be called to testify before the senate, which would be under oath.Hawaii announced today that it would join a new public health alliance formed by a trio of west coast states in response to the turmoil at the CDC.On Wednesday, the California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state had partnered with Washington and Oregon to form the West Coast Health Alliance, which they said would provide residents with science-based immunization guidance as the nation’s top public health agency – and a slew of red states – roll back long-standing recommendations medical experts and researchers have credited with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.“By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe,”Josh Green, theDemocratic governor of Hawaii, said in a statement.Green, an emergency room physician, said a science-driven approach was “critical as we all go forward into an era with severe threats from infectious diseases”.The Democratic governors of California, Oregon and Washington unveiled the new alliance on the same day that Florida’s Republican surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.The investigation, which followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the US attorneys’ offices in the northern district of Georgia and the eastern district of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s allegations, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her. Cook’s lawyer, prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, said the DoJ was scrambling to invent new justifications for Trump’s overreach in firing the Fed governor.“He wants cover, and they are providing it. The questions over how Governor Cook described her properties from time to time, which we have started to address in the pending case and will continue to do so, are not fraud, but it takes nothing for this DOJ to undertake a new politicized investigation, and they appear to have just done it again,” Lowell said.The case, which will likely end up before the supreme court, has ramifications for the Fed’s ability to set interest rate policy without regard to politicians’ wishes, widely seen as critical to any central bank’s ability to keep inflation under control.Trump has demanded that the US central bank cut rates immediately and aggressively, berating Fed chair Jerome Powell for his stewardship of monetary policy. The central bank is expected to deliver a rate cut at its 16-17 September meeting.In one of her recent legal filings challenging Trump’s actions, Cook said she listed mortgages on three properties on forms submitted to the White House and Senate in the vetting process for her appointment to the Fed in 2022. Any inconsistencies were known when she was confirmed and cannot give Trump grounds to fire her now.Cook is the third public official to be targeted in a criminal investigation over mortgage fraud allegations. Martin, who also presides over the “Weaponization Working Group” and serves as pardon attorney, is also pursuing criminal investigations into Democratic senator Adam Schiff as well as New York attorney general Letitia James.There are also grand juries convened in those two cases, which started prior to Martin’s new appointment as a special assistant US attorney, according to the source and documents seen by Reuters.The United States will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The plan comes in the broader context of Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” foreign policy, in which his administration has slashed foreign aid and is pushing European countries to cover more of the cost of their own security.The move, first reported by the Financial Times (paywall), comes as Russia’s war with Ukraine has heightened concerns in Europe about regional instability and the possibility of further aggression from Moscow. Key recipients of the funding include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Congress has approved funding for the assistance plan, which comes under the Department of Defense, but only through the end of September 2026. Trump’s administration has not asked that the program be extended, according to the FT report and confirmed to Reuters by one of its sources.Asked for comment, a White House official referred to an order Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term in January.“On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order to reevaluate and realign United States foreign aid,” the official said.“This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president’s longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defense,” the official said.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the decision misguided.“It makes no sense at all to undercut our allies’ defense readiness at the same time that we’re asking them to step up their own capabilities, and it puts American troops at risk when we slash the training of the allied soldiers they would fight alongside,” she said in a statement. More

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      Trump asks US supreme court to overturn trade tariffs ruling

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      Donald Trump has asked the US supreme court to overturn a lower court decision that most of his sweeping trade tariffs were illegal.The US president filed a petition late on Wednesday to ask for a review of last week’s federal appeals court ruling in Washington DC, which centred on his “liberation day” border taxes introduced on 2 April, which imposed levies of between 10% and 50% on most US imports, sending shock waves through global trade and markets.The court found in a 7-4 ruling last Friday that Trump had overstepped his presidential powers when he invoked a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies to justify his “reciprocal” tariffs.The decision was the biggest blow yet to Trump’s tariff policies, but the levies were left in place until 14 October – giving the administration time to ask the supreme court to review the decision.Trump has now appealed and the supreme court is expected to review the case, although the justices must still agree to do so. The administration asked for that decision to be made by 10 September.The appeal calls for an accelerated schedule with arguments being heard by 10 November, according to filings seen by Bloomberg. Justices could then rule by the end of the year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe ruling that the tariffs were unlawful upheld a previous decision by the US Court of International Trade.The federal appeals court said last Friday that US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”.It said many of Trump’s steep tariffs were “unbounded in scope, amount and duration”, the ruling added, and “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration has leaned on.A defeat for Trump’s levies would at least halve the current average US effective tariff rate of 16.3%, and could force the country to pay back tens of billions of dollars, according to Chris Kennedy, an analyst at Bloomberg Economics. It could also derail the preliminary trade deals the president has struck with some countries, including the UK and the European Union.Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress, but Trump claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.Earlier this week, the US clothing brand Levi’s said that “rising anti-Americanism as a consequence of the Trump tariffs and governmental policies” could drive British shoppers away from its denim. Other brands, such as Tesla, have also suffered in Europe and in Canada, while protests against US goods have led to a slump in sales of Jack Daniel’s whiskey. More

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      Trump makes false claims about US tariffs revenue and says White House trash video is ‘AI-generated’ – live

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      Following Donald Trump’s announcement that he is moving US Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, in part, he suggested, to punish Colorado for using vote-by-mail, the president took questions from reporters in the White House pool for the first time in a week. Several of his answers were false or misleading.

      Asked to comment on the federal appeals court ruling last week that most of his tariffs are illegal, Trump falsely claimed that the US has taken in trillions of dollars” because of the tariffs. Actual tariff revenue in 2025 is about $115bn, as the economist Justin Wolfers has pointed out, which has been paid by American importers, not, as Trump claims, other countries. The president said that the administration will be asking the supreme court to issue an expedited ruling to reverse the appeals court finding that he exceeded his authority under the 1977 International Economic Emergency Act by imposing tariffs without the consent of Congress.

      While dismissing rumors about his health, prompted by his sudden lack of public appearances, and a persistent bruise on his right hand that was again covered by makeup on Tuesday, Trump was shown video of a garbage bag being tossed out of an upper floor of the White House over the weekend and claimed that it must have been “AI-generated”, since, he said, the windows are too heavy to lift and “sealed”. But the White House has already acknowledged that the video was genuine and said that contractors had thrown the material out the window.

      On his deployment of troops in Los Angeles, Trump was asked to respond to the ruling from a federal judge in California on Tuesday that the use of troops to enforce the law was illegal and must stop. He bristled at the question, accusing the reporter who asked him of making “a statement”, and of leaving out what he said was an important detail. “The judge said that you can leave the 300 people that you already have in place. They can stay. They can remain. They can do what they have to do”, the president claimed.In fact, Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the troops Trump ordered to Los Angeles had clearly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the military from being used for law enforcement, and issued an injunction blocking them from carrying out any such activities from now on.Referring to the Trump administration, the judge wrote: “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws. The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”The 300 National Guard troops who remain stationed in Los Angeles, the judge wrote: “have already been improperly trained as to what activities they can and cannot engage in under the Posse Comitatus Act. Further, President Trump’s recent executive orders and public statements regarding the National Guard raise serious concerns as to whether he intends to order troops to violate the Posse Comitatus Act elsewhere in California.”As a result, Breyer ordered, the administration is now “enjoined from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants”.
      The US military has conducted “a lethal strike” against an alleged “drug vessel” from Venezuela, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has announced amid growing tensions between Washington and Caracas.Donald Trump trailed the announcement during an address at the White House on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters the US had “just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out … a drug-carrying boat”.“And there’s more where that came from. We have a lot of drugs pouring into our country,” the US president added. “We took it out,” he said of the boat.Shortly after, Rubio offered further details of the incident on social media, tweeting that the military had “conducted a strike in the southern Caribbean against a drug vessel which had departed from Venezuela and was being operated by a designated narco-terrorist organization”.It was not immediately clear what kind of vessel had been targeted, or, crucially, if the incident had taken place inside the South American country’s territorial waters.John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, has warned Democrats that he may move to change the chamber’s rules around confirmations if they do not agree to more quickly approve Donald Trump’s nominees.With the exception of secretary of state Marco Rubio, Democrats have forced time-consuming roll call votes on every single executive nominee Trump has made since taking office in January. Under previous administrations, including Joe Biden and Trump’s first term, senators from both parties agreed to confirm some nominees, typically for less controversial positions, by unanimous voice votes.In a floor speech on Tuesday, Thune warned that he may go ahead with plans to change Senate rules to prevent the Democrats from forcing votes on every nominee.“I’m here to tell my Democrat colleagues that their historic obstruction cannot continue”, he said, adding that 302 nominees were awaiting confirmation.“If Democrats continue to obstruct, if they continue to drag out confirmation of every single one of the nominations of a duly elected president, if they continue to slow the Senate’s business to such a drastic degree, then we’re going to have to take steps to get this process back on a reasonable footing”.Democrats have countered by arguing that Trump’s appointees are not qualified, and that they will not support a president who has tried to usurp Congress’s authorities on matters such as spending since taking office.“Historically bad nominees deserve a historic level of scrutiny by Senate Democrats”, minority leader Chuck Schumer said last month.Following Donald Trump’s announcement that he is moving US Space Command headquarters from Colorado to Alabama, in part, he suggested, to punish Colorado for using vote-by-mail, the president took questions from reporters in the White House pool for the first time in a week. Several of his answers were false or misleading.

      Asked to comment on the federal appeals court ruling last week that most of his tariffs are illegal, Trump falsely claimed that the US has taken in trillions of dollars” because of the tariffs. Actual tariff revenue in 2025 is about $115bn, as the economist Justin Wolfers has pointed out, which has been paid by American importers, not, as Trump claims, other countries. The president said that the administration will be asking the supreme court to issue an expedited ruling to reverse the appeals court finding that he exceeded his authority under the 1977 International Economic Emergency Act by imposing tariffs without the consent of Congress.

      While dismissing rumors about his health, prompted by his sudden lack of public appearances, and a persistent bruise on his right hand that was again covered by makeup on Tuesday, Trump was shown video of a garbage bag being tossed out of an upper floor of the White House over the weekend and claimed that it must have been “AI-generated”, since, he said, the windows are too heavy to lift and “sealed”. But the White House has already acknowledged that the video was genuine and said that contractors had thrown the material out the window.

      On his deployment of troops in Los Angeles, Trump was asked to respond to the ruling from a federal judge in California on Tuesday that the use of troops to enforce the law was illegal and must stop. He bristled at the question, accusing the reporter who asked him of making “a statement”, and of leaving out what he said was an important detail. “The judge said that you can leave the 300 people that you already have in place. They can stay. They can remain. They can do what they have to do”, the president claimed.In fact, Judge Charles Breyer ruled that the troops Trump ordered to Los Angeles had clearly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the military from being used for law enforcement, and issued an injunction blocking them from carrying out any such activities from now on.Referring to the Trump administration, the judge wrote: “at Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws. The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.”The 300 National Guard troops who remain stationed in Los Angeles, the judge wrote: “have already been improperly trained as to what activities they can and cannot engage in under the Posse Comitatus Act. Further, President Trump’s recent executive orders and public statements regarding the National Guard raise serious concerns as to whether he intends to order troops to violate the Posse Comitatus Act elsewhere in California.”As a result, Breyer ordered, the administration is now “enjoined from deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops heretofore deployed in California, to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants”.
      The coalition behind the “No Kings” rally have announced another mass protest set for 18 October.The nationwide protest that turned out hundreds of thousands of people is rooted in Trump’s threats to send militarized forces into different American cities and his detention and encampment of immigrants, the organizers say.“I would love to receive calls from governors and mayors saying they need help” Trump said about deploying national guard across the country while in the Oval Office. “We’ll help them, we have a lot of people, we have a great military force.”Trump said “he would be honored” to take a call from Illinois governor JB Pritzker to send national guard to his state.“I would love to have governor Pritzker call me”, Trump said. I’d gain respect for him and say we do have a problem, and we’d love to send in the troops, because you know what the people they have to be protected.”Trump said because of the national guard roaming around DC, new restaurants will open up in the city.“Washington DC is a safe zone right now, it’s a safe city” he said. “This took place in 12 days, now it’s 15 days, but three days ago it became what’s known as a safe zone”.“We took 1,600 people out,” Trump said.Pool reporters asked Trump about the latest on Russia-Ukraine talks, and the president shared that both countries had 7,313 soldiers killed over the last week. “For no reason whatsover” Trump said.The president didn’t comment on a potential meeting between Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian president Vladimir Putin.Speaking about the newly relocated Space Command in Huntsville, Alabama, Trump shared the latest on an ambitious missile defense system he dubbed the “golden dome”.The “golden dome” is Trump’s gold-plated take on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, though his version would apparently be so impressive that “everybody wants to be a participant in it.”Canada, according to Trump, has already come calling.“Canada called they want to be a part of it, and that’ll be great”, he said. “Canada wants very much to be included in that. Then we’re going to work something out with them.”Trump also took a parting swipe at Colorado, which was hosting Space Command as a temporary headquarters.“I want to thank Colorado. The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail in voting. They went to all mail in voting. So they have automatically, crooked elections.”Trump says the Space Command relocation promises 30,000 jobs and economic investment that Trump inflated in real-time from “hundreds of millions” to “billions and billions of dollars” because, as he explained, “it can’t be millions”.Trump justified the move by saying it would help America “defend and dominate the high frontier as they call it”.Donald Trump announced that US Space Command headquarters will officially move from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama.The president declared Huntsville would “forever be known from this point forward as Rocket City” – apparently unaware the Alabama city has held that title since the 1950s thanks to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.Trump couldn’t resist linking the decision to his electoral performance. “I only won it by about 47 points,” he said about Tennessee, before adding: “I don’t think that influenced my decision, though, right?”Two-term Iowa Republican senator Joni Ernst has decided to officially bow out of a re-election bid.“After a tremendous amount of prayer and reflection, I will not be seeking re-election in 2026”, Ernst said in a video announcement.Ernst is the first woman combat veteran to serve in the Senate, where Republicans hold a narrow 53-47 majority.A group of the US’s leading climate scientists have compiled a withering review of a controversial Trump administration report that downplays the risks of the climate crisis, finding that the document is biased, riddled with errors and fails basic scientific credibility.More than 85 climate experts have contributed to a comprehensive 434-page report that excoriates a US Department of Energy (DOE) document written by five hand-picked fringe researchers that argues that global heating and its resulting consequences have been overstated.The Trump administration report, released in July, contains “pervasive problems with misrepresentation and selective citation of the scientific literature, cherry-picking of data, and faulty or absent statistics”, states the new analysis, which is written in the style of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.“This report makes a mockery of science,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.“It relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes and confirmation bias. This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”Amy Coney Barrett, the conservative supreme court justice whose controversial fast-track confirmation at the end of Donald Trump’s first presidency led directly to the panel’s vote to strike down abortion rights nationally, has expressed in a new memoir her belief that the ruling “respected the choice” of the American people.Barrett was paid a $2m advance for her book Listening to the Law, according to CNN, which obtained a copy and published brief extracts on Tuesday, a week before its 9 September publication.“[T]he court’s role is to respect the choices that the people have agreed upon, not to tell them what they should agree to,” Barrett writes, according to CNN. The outlet framed Barrett’s comment as reflecting her belief that her predecessors’ 7-2 vote in Roe v Wade had “usurped the will of the American people”.Rudy Giuliani’s hospital discharge comes a day after Donald Trump said he will award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Associated Press reported.The decision places the award on a man once lauded for leading New York after the September 11, 2001, attacks and later sanctioned by courts and disbarred for amplifying false claims about the 2020 US presidential election. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, was also criminally charged in two states; he has denied wrongdoing.Trump on his Truth Social platform called Giuliani the “greatest Mayor in the history of New York City, and an equally great American Patriot”.Rudy Giuliani has been discharged from the hospital and is “progressing well” following a car collision in New Hampshire on Saturday, his spokesperson Ted Goodman said.“The mayor would like to thank the New Hampshire State Police, paramedics, Elliot Hospital, and all the physicians and nurses who provided incredible care” Goodman added. More

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      Here’s what to know about the court ruling striking down Trump’s tariffs

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      Donald Trump suffered the biggest defeat yet to his tariff policies on Friday, as a federal appeals court ruled he had overstepped his presidential powers when he enacted punitive financial measures against almost every country in the world.In a 7-4 ruling, the Washington DC court said that while US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency”, none of those actions allow for the imposition of tariffs or taxes.It means the ultimate ruling on the legality of Trump’s tariffs, which were famously based on spurious economic science and rocked the global economy when he announced them in April, will probably be made by the US supreme court.Here’s what to know.Which tariffs did the court knock down?The decision centers on the tariffs Trump introduced on 2 April, on what he called “liberation day”. The tariffs set a 10% baseline on virtually all of the US’s trading partners and so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on countries he argued have unfairly treated the US. Lesotho, a country of 2.3 million people in southern Africa, was hit with a 50% tariff, while Trump also announced a tariff of 10% on a group of uninhabited islands populated by penguins.The ruling voided all those tariffs, with the judges finding the president’s measures “unbounded in scope, amount and duration”. They said the tariffs “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration used to pass them.Tariffs typically need to be approved by Congress, but Trump claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.The court ruled: “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”Trump invoked the same law in February to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, claiming that the flow of undocumented immigrants and drugs across the US border amounted to a national emergency, and that the three countries needed to do more to stop it.Are the tariffs gone now?No. The court largely upheld a May decision by a federal trade court in New York that ruled Trump’s tariffs were illegal. But Friday’s ruling tossed out a part of that ruling that would have struck down the tariffs immediately.The court said the ruling would not take effect until 14 October. That allows the Trump administration time to appeal to the majority-conservative US supreme court, which will have the ultimate say on whether Trump has the legal right, as president, to upend US trade policy.What does this mean for Trump’s trade agenda?The government has argued that if Trump’s tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it has collected, which would deliver a financial blow to the US treasury.Revenue from tariffs totaled $159bn by July, more than double what it was at the same point last year. The justice department warned in a legal filing this month that revoking the tariffs could mean “financial ruin” for the United States.The ruling could also put Trump on shaky ground in trying to impose tariffs going forward. The president does have alternative laws for imposing import tariffs, but they would limit the speed and severity with which he could act.In its decision in May, the trade court said that Trump has more limited power to impose tariffs to address trade deficits under another statute, the Trade Act of 1974. But that law restricts tariffs to 15% and to just 150 days on countries with which the United States runs big trade deficits.How has Trump respondedHe’s not happy. Trump spent Friday evening reposting dozens of social media posts that were critical of the court’s decision. In a post on his own social media site, Trump claimed, as he tends to do when judges rule against him, that the decision was made by a “highly partisan appeals court”.“If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country,” Trump wrote. He added: “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”Trump claimed “tariffs are the best tool to help our workers”, despite their costs being typically borne by everyday Americans. The tariffs have triggered economic and political uncertainty across the world and stoked fears of rising inflation. More

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      Most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal, federal court rules

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      Donald Trump overstepped his presidential powers with most of his globe-rattling tariff policies, a federal appeals court in Washington DC ruled on Friday.US law “bestows significant authority on the president to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax”, the court said in the 7-4 ruling.Many of Trump’s steep tariffs are “are unbounded in scope, amount and duration”, the ruling added, and “assert an expansive authority that is beyond the express limitations” of the law his administration has leant on.The court’s decision is the biggest blow yet to Trump’s tariff policies and will likely mean the supreme court will have to rule on whether he has the legal right as president to upend US trade policy. The court said the ruling would not take effect until 14 October.“ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT!” Trump wrote on social media, moments after the ruling came down, after the stock markets closed ahead of a three-day weekend in the US. In a lengthy post, he accused the appeals court of political bias.“If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America,” he continued. “At the start of this Labor Day weekend, we should all remember that TARIFFS are the best tool to help our Workers, and support Companies that produce great MADE IN AMERICA products.”The ruling voided Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs that set a 10% baseline on virtually all of the US’s trading partners and his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on countries he has argued have unfairly treated the US.Trump has claimed he has the right to impose tariffs on trading partners under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which in some circumstances grants the president authority to regulate or prohibit international transactions during a national emergency.The Trump administration has cited various national emergencies – including US trade deficits with trading partners, fentanyl trafficking, and immigration – as the reasons for the actions.But a group of small businesses has challenged the administration’s arguments, arguing they are “devastating small businesses across the country”.And on Friday, the appellate court ruled: “It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the president unlimited authority to impose tariffs.”The ruling also said the US law “neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the president’s power to impose tariffs”.Earlier on Friday, Bloomberg reported that the administration, worried the court might invalidate the tariffs immediately, filed statements by Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warning that such a decision would be a “dangerous diplomatic embarrassment” for the US.In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said that Trump “lawfully exercised the tariff powers granted to him by Congress to defend our national and economic security from foreign threats”.He said: “The president’s tariffs remain in effect, and we look forward to ultimate victory on this matter.”William Reinsch, a former senior commerce department official now with the Center on Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters that the Trump administration had been bracing for this ruling. He said: “It’s common knowledge the administration has been anticipating this outcome and is preparing a Plan B, presumably to keep the tariffs in place via other statutes.”The US trade court heard the case – VOS Selections Inc v Trump – in May, and ruled that the tariffs “exceed any authority granted to the president”. But the court agreed to a temporary pause in the decision pending an appeal hearing.The US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC heard oral arguments about the case on 31 July. Judges expressed skepticism about the administration’s arguments at the hearing. The IEEPA “doesn’t even say ‘tariffs’”, one of the judges noted. “Doesn’t even mention them.”In its ruling, the appeals court noted there were “numerous statutes” that do delegate the power to impose tariffs, in which “clear and precise terms” are used to this make clear.When Congress wants to delegate such authority, it typically “does so explicitly, either by using unequivocal terms like tariff and duty, or via an overall structure which makes clear that Congress is referring to tariffs”, the court added.It said: “The absence of any such tariff language in IEEPA contrasts with statutes where Congress has affirmatively granted such power and included clear limits on that power.”Trump’s tariffs have triggered economic and political uncertainty across the world and stoked fears of rising inflation. More

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      Trump’s tariffs replace diplomacy as other US tools of statecraft are discarded

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      On the campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to use tariffs to revitalise American industry, bringing jobs home and helping to make America great again. But more than six months into his administration, experts say the president’s trade war is increasingly being wielded as a political cudgel, in lieu of more traditional forms of diplomacy.The president’s current target, India, has been unable to reach a trade agreement, and Trump appears ready to follow through with his threat to impose a further 25% tariff on Delhi – bringing the total to 50% – the joint highest levy on any country, along with Brazil.It is a whiplash-inducing turnaround from a few months ago, when the newly minted Trump administration seemed intent on continuing a years-long bipartisan effort to deepen ties with India as a geopolitical counterweight to China. It’s part of a trend that highlights how tariffs are used as threats against countries perceived to be recalcitrant. Rather than a tool of economic coercion, Trump instead wields tariffs as a political weapon.Five rounds of trade talks between the two sides have brought India no closer to conceding to US demands that it open up its vast agriculture and dairy sectors. Negotiations planned for early next week have been abruptly called off, as India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, grapples with Trump’s demand that India cease to buy oil from Russia; sales that the US says are helping to fuel Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.The demand – that India wean itself off the Russian oil, which accounts for about 35% of its total supply – sits at odds with the original stated purpose of Trump’s tariff regime: to bring manufacturing back to the US and rebalance trade deficits.“Tariffs have a very specific purpose of protecting domestic industry from competition,” says Dr Stuart Rollo from the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. “That’s not really what this is about … It’s kind of pivoted to a tool of geopolitical compulsion.”Trump himself has come to admit this. Along with the threatened additional 25% tariff on India in retaliation for continuing to purchase Russian oil, the president has tied Canada’s 35% tariff to its recognition of Palestinian statehood.In the case of Brazil, which has a rare trade surplus with the US, meaning it buys more than it sells, Trump has said that the huge 50% tariff is due to the trial of his political ally, Jair Bolsonaro, who is charged with plotting a military coup after he lost the 2022 presidential election.The president’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, even has a new term for these explicitly political trade threats: “national security tariffs”.The Democratic senator Chris Murphy put it more bluntly, writing in the Financial Times in April that the tariffs are not designed as economic policy but as a “means to compel loyalty to the president”.Rollo says: “It’s a way of the United States to compel as much of the world as possible into realignment with its global leadership at a time when its actual weight and gravity is diminishing.”In some ways, this is not new; the Biden administration used trade restrictions to limit China’s access to state-of-the-art semiconductors at a time of heated geopolitical tensions.But Devashish Mitra, a professor of economics at Syracuse University, says that for many in India, the threat faced over Russian oil purchases seems incoherent, ill thought out, and could push India closer to China.“India did consider the US an ally,” says Mitra. “It was a country that the US was relying on as a counter to China in that region. So it had a huge geopolitical importance, but it doesn’t seem like Trump values any of that.”This week, China’s foreign minister has been in Delhi for talks, and Modi is expected in Shanghai at the end of the month, his first visit in seven years. It’s a part of a recent pattern of tightening relations between the Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which make up 40% of global GDP – that experts say is a response to Trump’s aggressive trade policies.For future US administrations, winning back the trust of some of these countries could be difficult, as Trump’s escalating trade war comes at the same time as his administration dismantles its instruments of global statecraft. From mass firings at the state department to the slashing of foreign assistance programmes at USAID, America’s diplomatic toolbox is vastly diminished.Tariffs have “come to replace diplomacy”, says Rollo.And so with his attention divided between crises at home and abroad, the president has left himself armed with only a hammer, with every global flashpoint looking to him like a nail. More

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      Trump’s promise of a US manufacturing renaissance leaves experts scratching their heads

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      Donald Trump’s hugely disruptive trade war is setting the stage for a manufacturing renaissance in the US, administration officials say. Outside the White House, many economists are skeptical.Global trade experts point to many reasons they believe the president’s tariffs will fail to bring about a major resurgence of manufacturing, among them: Trump’s erratic, constantly changing policies, his unfocused, across-the-board tariffs, and his replacing Joe Biden’s carrot-and-sticks approach to brandish sticks at the world.“I think [Trump’s tariffs] will reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturing, and will reduce manufacturing employment,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “They’re raising the costs of production to US manufacturing companies, and that makes manufacturers less competitive. There will be some winners and some losers, but the losers will outnumber the winners.”‘Trump keeps changing his mind’The president and his aides insist that higher tariffs on more than 100 countries – making goods imported from overseas more expensive – will spur domestic manufacturing. “The ‘Made in USA’ label is set to resume its global dominance under President Trump,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai claimed recently.But few economists see that happening. Ann E Harrison, an economics professor and former dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said the erratic, on-again-off-again rollout of Trump’s tariffs has already gone far to doom the president’s hopes of inspiring a huge wave of manufacturing investment.“For the policy to be successful, it has to be consistent over a long period,” she told the Guardian. “People need to believe it’s going to last. Some factories take five years to plan and build. You’re talking a long-term play. But Trump keeps changing his mind. Even over the last six months, we’ve had very little consistency.“The other problem is that he’s old, and no one is sure he’s going to be around that long. These policies need to be consistent, and that’s not happening.”Economists point to another question mark that is causing corporate executives to think twice about building factories in the US. In May, the US Court of International Trade ruled that Trump’s blanket tariffs are illegal – a decision that is under appeal.Strain, at the AEI, said: “When you add into the equation the erratic nature of president Trump’s tariff regime, when you add the question of its questionable illegality, when you add that none of this is going through Congress, when you add that even when the US secures a ‘deal’ with another country, it’s not really a deal, there are major outstanding questions.”France doesn’t think its alcohol exports will be hit by tariffs as part of the European Union’s agreement to pay 15% tariffs, noted Strain. “That’s a big question mark that would never go unresolved in any regular, traditional trade deal,” he said. “That’s all part of the massive uncertainty we’re seeing.”The Biden administration used deliberate industrial policies to boost several strategic industries, most notably semiconductors and electric vehicles, including a 100% tariff on EVs from China and 25% on lithium-ion EV batteries, as well as subsidies to buy EVs and build EV-related factories. The policies resulted in a surge in new factories to build semiconductors, electric vehicles and EV components.Biden “said we care about semiconductors and national security, and what he’d try to do is get actual investors to invest in it”, said Dani Rodrik, an economist specializing in trade and industrial policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who predicted Trump’s blanket tariffs will prove less successful in inspiring investment. “If you really want to increase manufacturing and employment in the US, you’d go about it in a very different way, through industrial policies that first identify specific segments you care about.”When China, Japan and South Korea adopted policies to build their electronics and auto industries, they insisted that the corporations that benefited from those policies compete with foreign companies to help make them globally competitive. “For industrial policy to succeed, it has to work to promote more competition,” said Harrison, at the Haas School of Business. “The problem with tariffs is they do just the opposite. They restrict competition.”Susan Helper, an economist at Case Western Reserve University who worked on industrial policy in the Biden and Obama administrations, said Trump’s tariff rates on some countries and markets – like 15% on the EU, Japan and South Korea – are too low to spur much investment, questioning why a company would build a major factory to circumvent such a duty.“A [semiconductor fabrication] plant, that’s a billion dollars. You need to get a payback and that takes several years,” Helper said. “If the tariffs are 145% [as Trump once imposed on China], that’s attractive for building a plant. But if they fall back to 15%, then it’s really hard to get a return on your investment.”The administration boasts that several of its trade deals have specific commitments to spur huge manufacturing investment. It says its deal with the EU includes a $600bn investment pledge; with Japan, a $550bn investment pledge; and with South Korea, $350bn. Jamieson Greer, US trade representative, wrote in the New York Times: “These investments – 10 times larger than the inflation-adjusted value of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II – will accelerate US reindustrialization.”But these supposed pledges have attracted skepticism. After all, this president claimed during his first term that “the eighth wonder of the world” was being built in Wisconsin after FoxConn pledged to invest $10bn and create 13,000 jobs at an electronics plant. But that promise fell embarrassingly short.Many economists question whether the EU, Japan or South Korea can force corporations to make a specific investment in the US. Indeed, an EU Commission spokesperson said the bloc had expressed “aggregate intentions” that are “in no way” binding. “These large numbers really sound like window dressing, some round numbers they’re throwing around,” said Harvard’s Rodrik.“Some include investments you were already going to make, and some are aspirational,” said Todd Tucker, a trade and industrial policy expert at the Roosevelt Institute. “Once we’ve had time to evaluate whether the investment happens or not, Trump will be on to the next press cycle.”In recent years, manufacturing employment has been trending downward – not just in advanced industrial countries, but also in China, as new technologies enable factories to churn out goods more efficiently, with fewer workers. That trend raises questions whether Trump’s trade policies can increase factory jobs in the US.‘An island of backwardness’The US is past its manufacturing peak, Berkeley’s Harrison noted. “That was actually during World War Two, and it has been declining ever since,” she said. “I don’t see manufacturing’s share of the economy or manufacturing employment reversing.”She added: “If the question is, are you going to bring about a major resurgence in manufacturing employment, it’s not just unlikely, the answer is no. More and more manufacturing is robot-driven and not done by people.”Auto industry officials in the US complain that Trump’s 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum have increased their costs and injured their competitiveness. “In manufacturing, for every one job in steel production, there are 80 jobs that use steel,” the AEI’s Strain said. “So putting tariffs on imported steel might help that one guy, but you’re hurting the other 80 people.”A study by Federal Reserve economists found that the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term were actually associated with a reduction in factory jobs nationwide, because increased input costs and retaliatory tariffs outweighed import protection from tariffs.Helper, at Case Western Reserve University, warned that the US auto industry will be hurt badly by Trump’s mishmash of tariffs coupled with his slashing subsidies for EVs. “Trump’s policies are setting the auto industry up to be an island of backwardness,” she said. “The rest of the world is going to be making EVs, but we’re going to be focused on making really high profits on pickup trucks that will be bad for the climate and won’t sell in the rest of the world.“We’ll have a great, competitive position in large, gas-guzzling pickups, but we’ll fall further behind in EVs. That’s a very risky and dangerous path.” More

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      Farmers in US midwest squeezed by Trump tariffs and climate crisis

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      Seventh-generation farmer Brian Harbage grows corn, soybeans and grass, and runs a cattle operation across five counties in western Ohio. In the world of agriculture, his work makes up a large business.And still, the past two years have been immensely challenging amid the twin threats of the climate crisis and the Trump administration.Last year, regions of the eastern corn belt saw just 20% of crops harvested due to a drought that brought little precipitation between June and October. It was part of a climatic cycle that involved drought, heat and wildfires that cost crop producers $11bn nationally.“Last year, we got a good crop started, and then it just quit raining. Our yields were definitely reduced by at least 25-30%,” says Harbage.This year, it’s been almost the complete opposite.Excess rainfall has fueled severe disease and pest pressure on the several thousand acres of soybeans and corn he planted in the spring.“There were three-day windows, it seemed like. It would just start to get dried out and it would rain,” he says.“We finished up [planting] at the beginning of June. We like to be finished by 15 May. Anything that’s planted later means that it was probably planted in marginal conditions since we were rushing to get it in, and secondly, it doesn’t have near enough time to mature before harvest.”With the 2025 harvest of corn and soybeans approaching – America’s biggest two crops and the linchpins of agriculture – crop growers are facing down the gauntlet. Climatic swings, rocketing operating costs and low international demand, caused, in large part, by government policy in the shape of tariffs, has created the perfect storm.“Farming is not for the worrisome,” says Harbage. “We always kid that we are crisis managers.”Suicide rates among farmers are 3.5 times the national level.In 2023-24, China bought 24.9m metric tons of soybeans worth $13.2bn, largely used to feed its 427-million-strong pig herd. At under 6m metric tons, US farmers’ second biggest international soybean market, Mexico, lags far behind.Since 2017, when tariffs were first introduced by President Trump, crop farmers have been struggling with the decline of China as the leading market for soybeans and an important market for corn exports.Last month, reports emerged that exports of soybeans – America’s largest grain export by value – had hit a 20-year low.“Tariffs are probably something that will help in the long run, for the whole country; in the short run it’s terrible for farmers,” says Harbage.“We’re really taking it on the chin now because if we can’t export, our prices are low. And if we can’t export and we have a terrible crop then it’s a one-two punch. I see what the government wants to do, but it’s hurting me in the near term.”Farmers and rural Americans are keen to highlight that their political and voting preferences are rarely fueled by a single issue or event such as tariffs. Many continue to back Trump, despite the obvious financial challenges the president’s policies are fomenting.Trump has been largely silent on addressing the pain his tariffs have caused farmers and ranchers, despite rural voters being a cornerstone of his political base. On 10 August, he posted to Truth Social a demand that China quadruple its purchases of American soybeans. The president claimed that China was “worried” about having a soybean shortage, although China has vowed to increase its domestic soybean production yield by 38% by 2034.What’s more, some market analysts say that Trump’s post didn’t make the rounds on Chinese social media, suggesting his demand may not have been heard by the country’s political leaders.With the soybean harvest in the midwest set to start about a month from now, and corn following weeks later, the fear that China may not buy a single shipload of grain this season is growing for many.“With [tariffs] in place, we are not competitive with soybeans from Brazil. Our marketing year starts 1 October and usually by now we’d see China making commitments to pre-purchases for soybeans. China has not made a single purchase for US soybeans,” says Virginia Houston, director of government affairs at the American Soybean Association, a lobbying organization.“No market can match China’s demand for soybeans. Right now, there is a 20% retaliatory duty from China.”To appease his farming base, the Trump administration announced $60bn in subsidies for farmers over the next decade in the recent tax bill, but that has drawn criticism from those who say that farmers shouldn’t be subsidized on taxpayers’ dime.Others have reported that funding is going to select producers in specific regions of the US, benefiting bigger producers rather than family farms. Adding to the export challenges, the price of commodity crops in the US has been in steady decline for the past three years due to a smaller cattle herd and falling ethanol production.Houston says that when she speaks with the White House and Congress to share the struggles farmers are facing due to tariffs, the response is that “they support farmers [but] we are one cog in the wheel of this complex relationship.“The farm economy is in a much tougher place than where we were in 2018 [during Trump’s previous China trade war]. Prices have gone down while inputs – seed, fertilizer, chemicals, land and equipment – continue to go up.”All the while, unpredictable weather conditions continue to make planning more difficult.For much of this summer, afternoon storms had been a near-daily occurrence in Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere in the eastern corn belt, causing ponding that kills early plant growth. Diseases such as northern corn leaf blight, gray leaf spot and tar spot soon followed.“When it’s being attacked by disease, it’s not growing to its full potential because it’s trying to fight off the disease,” says Harbage.Although he treated his crops for disease, the heat and humidity that have been an uncommon feature of life this summer can overcome the effects of fungicides.On top of that, Harbage says he’ll have to spend additional money on propane to dry his corn before sending it to consumers, again due to the high moisture content.If Trump walked into his farm today, Harbage says he’d have one message.“The exports is number one. That’s the number one fix. We have to get rid of what we’re growing, or we have to be able to use it,” he says.“China, Mexico and Canada – we export $83bn worth of commodities to them a year. So if they’re not buying, we’re stuck with our crop.”

      In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org More