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      How Trump Insists on Thanks From Zelensky and Other Foreign Leaders

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      It’s not unusual for presidents to want to hear some words of gratitude. But the friction usually happens behind closed doors.After President Trump spoke on the phone with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last week, the White House wanted to make one thing clear: The Ukrainian leader was grateful to the American president. Very grateful.The statement recounting the call mentioned four times that Mr. Zelensky had thanked the president for his efforts to negotiate terms of a ceasefire with Russia. It then went on to note that Mr. Zelensky was “grateful” for Mr. Trump’s leadership.The description revealed a pattern in the Trump administration’s shaping of its foreign policy agenda: When it comes to diplomacy, Mr. Trump wants an implicit or explicit display of personal gratitude from American allies.Michael Froman, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Mr. Trump’s transactional approach to diplomacy suggests that he sees aiding U.S. allies as a favor, rather than as a cornerstone of foreign policy that will pay dividends down the road.“That does sort of signal a fundamentally different notion of order than we have had for the last 80 years, which is that while our allies need to step up and do more for their own defense, our support of their defense is also in our interest,” Mr. Froman said. “ I believe President Trump is questioning that.”The starkest example of Trump’s insistence on a thank-you came during a meeting last month in the Oval Office that included Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Mr. Zelensky.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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      A Montana Senator Seeks to Be Trump’s Voice in Beijing

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      Since President Trump began his second term in January, no high-level officials from the United States have met with their counterparts in China, even as the world’s two largest economies have taken turns imposing steep tariffs on each other.In the absence of official meetings, Senator Steve Daines of Montana has cast himself as a go-between. Mr. Daines met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who oversees many economic issues for China, on Saturday and was set to meet Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official, on Sunday.In an interview with The New York Times on Saturday after the meeting with Mr. He, Mr. Daines, a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he urged China to take effective action to halt the export of chemical precursors for fentanyl.“I met with President Trump a few days before I came over, and he was pleased that I was coming to communicate his ‘America First’ message and, importantly, to make sure that Chinese leaders knew the seriousness of the fentanyl issue, and the role that China can play in stopping the shipment of precursors to the Mexican cartels,” Mr. Daines said.Chinese officials have said that the fentanyl crisis is rooted in an American failure to curb demand for the drug, and that Beijing has taken effective measures to limit shipments of fentanyl and its chemical precursors. China’s cabinet issued a report earlier this month on its fentanyl measures, and Mr. Daines said this was being studied by American officials.Mr. Daines said he was trying to lay the groundwork for a meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping, China’s top leader. “This visit is the first step to arrange and set up the next step, which will be a very important meeting between President Xi and President Trump — when that occurs, I don’t know, where it occurs, I don’t know.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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

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

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      Were the Kennedy Files a Bust? Not So Fast, Historians Say.

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      The thousands of documents posted online this week disappointed assassination buffs. But historians are finding many newly revealed secrets.In June 1973, a C.I.A. employee wrote a memo at the request of William E. Colby, the agency’s director, listing various ways the C.I.A. had, to put it delicately, “exceeded” its charter over the years.The seven pages matter-of-factly described break-ins at the French Consulate in Washington, planned paramilitary attacks on Chinese nuclear facilities and injections of a “contaminating agent” in Cuban sugar bound for the Soviet Union. The memo ended with an offhand aside about John A. McCone, the agency’s former director.“Finally, and this will reflect my Middle Western Protestant upbringing, McCone’s dealings with the Vatican, including Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI, would and could raise eyebrows in certain quarters,” the author wrote.It was just one paragraph in the roughly 64,000 pages the National Archives posted online this week as part of the latest — and supposedly final — release of its vast collection of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.But for some of the scholars who immediately started combing through the documents, the brief passage, seen unredacted for the first time, raised eyebrows for sure.“This opens a door on a whole history of collaboration between the Vatican and the C.I.A., which, boy, would be explosive if we could get documents about,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an independent research center at George Washington University.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 Tariffs Have Sown Uncertainty. That Might Be the Point.

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      Since taking office, President Trump and his advisers have explained the president’s aggressive economic approach to tariffs with a litany of conflicting ideas. Other countries are “ripping off” America and need to be stopped. The United States is fighting a drug war with Canada, Mexico and China. Tariffs will help pay down the nation’s $36 trillion debt load.The messaging hodgepodge comes as the U.S. economy shows signs of strain in response to Mr. Trump’s steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and as he prepares to enact “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from around the world on April 2.The tariffs have sowed uncertainty and dampened business investment and consumer sentiment while sending markets gyrating daily. They are also likely to prevent the Federal Reserve from cutting rates as policymakers wait to see exactly what measures Mr. Trump follows through with and how they affect the economy.But rather than trying to provide more coherence about their economic strategy, Mr. Trump and his advisers seem to be embracing the uncertainty of his approach as a feature, not a bug.“Absolutely, between now and April 2, there’ll be some uncertainty,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on CNBC this week amid questions about what investors are to make of Mr. Trump’s trade agenda.Mr. Trump, when asked whether he would give the business community more clarity about his overall approach, largely dismissed concerns that corporations needed predictability.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 Officials Say Deportees Were Gang Members. So Far, Few Details.

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      Families and immigration lawyers argue not all of the deportees sent to a prison in El Salvador over the weekend had ties to gangs.In the days since the federal government sent hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, Washington has been debating whether the White House did indeed defy a federal judge who ordered the deportation flights to turn around and head back to the United States.But beyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate?The Trump White House has said that most of the immigrants deported were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, like many transnational criminal organizations, has a presence in the United States. Amid the record numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border in recent years, the gang’s presence in some American cities became a rallying cry for Donald J. Trump as he campaigned to return to the White House, claiming immigrants were invading the country.After Mr. Trump returned to power in January, Tren de Aragua remained a regular talking point for him and his immigration advisers, and the deportation flights last week were the administration’s most significant move yet to make good on its promise to go after the gang. But officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador, where the authoritarian government, allied with Mr. Trump, has agreed to hold the prisoners in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment.The Justice Department refused to answer basic inquiries on Monday about the deportations from the federal judge in Washington, D.C., who had ordered the deportation flight to return to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, he ordered the Justice Department to submit a sealed filing by noon on Wednesday detailing the times at which the planes had taken off, left American airspace and ultimately landed in El Salvador.More than half of the immigrants deported over the weekend were removed using an obscure authority known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Trump administration says it has invoked to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members age 14 or older with little to no due process. The rarely invoked law grants the president broad authority to remove from the United States citizens of foreign countries whom he defines as “alien enemies,” in cases of war or invasion.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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      With Deportations, Trump Steps Closer to Showdown With Judicial Branch

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      The Trump administration moved one large step closer to a constitutional showdown with the judicial branch of government when airplane-loads of Venezuelan detainees deplaned in El Salvador even though a federal judge had ordered that the planes reverse course and return the detainees to the United States.The right-wing president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, bragged that the 238 detainees who had been aboard the aircraft were transferred to a Salvadoran “Terrorism Confinement Center,” where they would be held for at least a year.“Oopsie … Too late,” Mr. Bukele wrote in a social media post on Sunday morning that was recirculated by the White House communications director, Steven Cheung.Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in another social media post, thanked Mr. Bukele for a lengthy post detailing the migrants’ incarceration.“This sure looks like contempt of court to me,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University. “You can turn around a plane if you want to.”Some details of the government’s actions remained unclear, including the exact time the planes landed. In a Sunday afternoon filing, the Trump administration said the State Department and Homeland Security Department were “promptly notified” of the judge’s written order when it was posted to the electronic docket at 7:26 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. The filing implied that the government had a different legal authority for deporting the Venezuelans besides the one blocked by the judge, which could provide a basis for them to remain in El Salvador while the order is appealed.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 Sends Hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador in Face of Judge’s Order

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      The Trump administration has sent hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador, pushing the limits of U.S. immigration law seemingly after a federal judge ordered that the deportation flights not proceed.President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted a three-minute video on social media on Sunday of men in handcuffs being led off a plane during the night and marched into prison. The video also shows prison officials shaving the prisoners’ heads.“Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, arrived in our country,” Mr. Bukele wrote, adding that “The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.”The Trump administration hopes that the unusual prisoner transfer deal — not a swap but an agreement for El Salvador to take suspected gang members — will be the beginning of a larger effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rapidly arrest and deport those it identifies as members of Tren de Aragua without many of the legal processes common in immigration cases.The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States. The law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in U.S. history — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization.On Saturday, Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law after President Trump issued an executive order invoking it.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