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      Trump’s Tariffs by Whim Keep Allies and Markets Off Balance

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      On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on Fox Business to reassure nervous allies and even more twitchy investors that the Trump administration was negotiating a deal to avoid tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada, and that the president is “gonna work something out with them.”“It’s not gonna be a pause” for Mr. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs, he insisted. “None of that pause stuff.”On Thursday, the world got what the president characterized as more of that pause stuff.Mr. Trump’s announcement that he had a good conversation with Mexico’s president, and would delay most tariffs until April 2, was only the latest example of the punish-by-whim nature of the second Trump presidency. A few hours after the Mexico announcement, Canada got a break too, even as Mr. Trump on social media accused its departing prime minister, Justin Trudeau, of using “the Tariff problem” to “run again for Prime Minister.”“So much fun to watch!” he wrote.Indeed, it appears that Mr. Trump is having enormous fun turning tariffs on and off like tap water. But others are developing a case of Trump-induced whiplash, not least investors, who sent stock prices down again on Thursday amid the uncertainty over what Mr. Trump’s inconstancy means for the global economy. (A later rise in stock futures pointed to rosier expectations for Friday.)When the White House finally released the text of Mr. Trump’s orders on Thursday evening, it appeared that some of the tariffs — those covered in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that Mr. Trump negotiated and celebrated in his first term — were indeed permanently suspended. Other tariffs were merely paused.Most everyone involved was confused, which may well have been the point.As Mr. Trump hands down tariff determinations and then pulls them back for a month or so, world leaders call to plead their case, a bit like vassal states appealing to a larger power. Chief executives put in calls as well, making it clear that Mr. Trump is the one you need to deal with if you are bringing in car parts from Canada or chips from China.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 Signs Order to Create a ‘Crypto Reserve,’ Adviser Says

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      President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create a national stockpile of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, an adviser said, an audacious idea that has been widely criticized as a scheme to enrich crypto investors.The basis of the stockpile will be a stash of Bitcoin, estimated to be worth as much as $17 billion, that the United States has seized in legal cases over the years, according to a summary of the order posted on social media by David Sacks, the White House’s crypto and A.I. policy czar.The order also calls for federal agencies to develop “budget-neutral strategies” to buy more Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency, as long as those purchases do not generate extra costs for taxpayers.“This Executive Order underscores President Trump’s commitment to making the U.S. the ‘crypto capital of the world,’” Mr. Sacks wrote in his post. He said the United States would not sell any Bitcoin in the reserve, which he likened to “a digital Fort Knox.”Since Mr. Trump took office in January, his administration has moved rapidly to elevate the crypto industry, a volatile sector that had battled with federal regulators for years. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped lawsuits against two of the biggest U.S. crypto companies and halted investigations into several others. And on Friday, Mr. Trump is scheduled to host crypto executives at the White House for a first-of-its-kind “crypto summit.”Mr. Trump has a personal stake in the success of the crypto industry, creating conflicts of interests that have raised alarms with government ethics experts. Last year, he started a business, World Liberty Financial, that offers a cryptocurrency called WLFI. Just days before his inauguration, he also began selling a so-called memecoin — a type of cryptocurrency tied to an online joke or a celebrity figure.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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      Why Do Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department?

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      President Trump’s fixation reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, and created a powerful point of unity between the factions of his party.Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.Here is how the party got to this moment.Conservatives make their argument.During his 1982 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Proposes Privatizing Amtrak, Calling Rail Service ‘Sad’

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      Almost since Amtrak’s creation in 1971, the 21,000-mile U.S. intercity passenger rail service has been fighting calls that it should be privatized.Now it may have met one of its most aggressive and powerful skeptics yet.Speaking at a tech conference on Wednesday, Elon Musk added Amtrak to the list of government-funded services on his chopping board, calling the federally owned railroad “embarrassing” and saying that privatization was the only way to fix it.“If you go to China, you get epic bullet train rides,” said Mr. Musk, the billionaire who is working to dismantle the federal bureaucracy under the Trump administration. “They’re amazing.”China’s trains, which are subsidized by the communist government and have produced large public debts, link every large Chinese city and run at speeds of at least 186 miles per hour. Amtrak’s northeastern Acela, the fastest American passenger train, tops out at about 150 m.p.h.“And you come back to America, and you’re like, ‘Amtrak is a sad situation,’” Mr. Musk said at the conference, which was organized by the bank Morgan Stanley. “If you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It’s going to leave you with a very bad impression of America.”Mr. Musk, who has criticized an ambitious effort to build a high-speed rail system in California, has also called for the privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, a concept that President Trump has floated. The president has not called for privatizing Amtrak, and the White House did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Thursday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Blocks Trump’s Funding Freeze, Saying White House Put Itself ‘Above Congress’

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      A federal judge on Thursday continued to bar the Trump administration from withholding billions in congressionally approved funds to 22 states and the District of Columbia.The ruling, which builds on the judge’s temporary order instructing the government to keep the money flowing, sets up a broader clash between Democratic states’ attorneys general over the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul spending to align with the president’s agenda.In an opinion handed down on Thursday morning, Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the Federal District Court for the District of Rhode Island said the lawsuit came down to a case of executive overreach, in which top administration officials had required agencies to withhold funds authorized by Congress.A memo from the White House budget office had demanded a pause on billions in grants until the administration could determine that the funding complied with Mr. Trump’s priorities, setting off days of confusion and alarm.Judge McConnell wrote that without the injunction, “the funding that the states are due and owed creates an indefinite limbo.”“Here, the executive put itself above Congress,” he wrote. “It imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.”The coalition of states had sued over the suspension of funding available from several agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they said put them in danger.The states suing filed a second motion last week to enforce the previous order, noting “significant obstacles to accessing federal funds” even after Judge McConnell had ordered agencies to let funding flow.“Moreover, the delays prompted by FEMA’s manual review process are significant and indefinite,” the states wrote, noting that some had requested disbursements since Feb. 7.In his order on Thursday, Judge McConnell appeared to agree that the prospect of states not having access in a disaster to emergency funds paused by the Trump administration was salient.“In an evident and acute harm, with floods and fires wreaking havoc across the country, federal funding for emergency management and preparedness would be impacted,” he wrote.The judge ordered that FEMA detail steps it had taken to unfreeze funds by March 14. More

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      Trump Shifts From Lifting Up America’s Neighbors to Hurting Them

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      When the United States signed a free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico more than 30 years ago, the premise was that partnering with two other thriving economies would also benefit America.This week, President Trump abruptly scrapped that idea. He imposed a sweeping 25 percent tariff on the roughly $1 trillion of imports that Mexico and Canada send into the United States each year as part of that North American trade pact. Those tariffs are expected to significantly raise costs for Canadian and Mexican exports, undermining their economies and likely tipping them into recession.Mr. Trump’s decision to unwind decades of economic integration raises big questions about the future of North America and the industries that have been built around the idea of an economically integrated continent. While some factories in Canada and Mexico might move to the United States to avoid tariffs, the levies will also raise costs for American consumers and manufacturers that have come to depend on materials from their North American neighbors.“This is a day where the United States stopped seeing trade as force for mutual benefit, and began seeing it as a tool of economic warfare,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added that the levies were “a fundamental attack on the economic well being of our closest neighbors.”Mr. Trump suggested on Wednesday that this arrangement could be long-lived, as he gave automakers who were abiding by the terms of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A., only a one month reprieve to prepare for the tariffs. Trump officials said that the president expected to issue more tariffs on Canada and Mexico next month, when he announces what he is calling “reciprocal” tariff measures.Howard Lutnick at Mr. Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress.Eric Lee/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Is Said to Be Preparing Order That Aims to Eliminate Education Dept.

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      President Trump is preparing to sign an order that would instruct Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin dismantling her agency, setting the stage for a potential power struggle with Congress and another round of legal challenges from opponents.An administration official said the order could be signed as soon as Thursday. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about private deliberations.No modern president has ever tried to unilaterally shut down a federal department. The Education Department was created by an act of Congress in 1979, and federal lawmakers would likely have to approve eliminating it.Mr. Trump’s order was expected to spark another legal fight for the administration, which is already embroiled in multiple lawsuits over actions in its first six weeks.The American Federation of Teachers noted in a statement late Wednesday that the Education Department was “legally required” to distribute federal funds — money approved for poor students, those with disabilities and others — to states.“Any attempt by the Trump administration or Congress to gut these programs would be a grave mistake, and we will fight them tooth and nail,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the union.A draft of Mr. Trump’s order circulated in Washington on Wednesday ahead of a potential announcement. The Wall Street Journal first reported that Mr. Trump could sign the order as soon as Thursday.Mr. Trump has been blunt about his desire to do away with the department entirely. He remarked recently that he hoped Ms. McMahon would effectively put herself out of a job.He told reporters last month that the Education Department was “a big con job” and that “I’d like to close it immediately.”Ms. McMahon’s first action as education secretary was to email the department’s staff about its “final mission,” an indication of how she planned to fulfill Mr. Trump’s goal of shuttering the department. More

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      Who’s Got Trump’s Ear on Tariffs? Lutnick or Navarro?

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      Corporate leaders and investors continue to be caught off guard by the president’s trade policy, especially as deal talks heat up. Looking for tariff relief? Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, appears to be one to call.Tierney L. Cross for The New York TimesWho’s in the room President Trump’s tariff policy has given corporate chiefs and investors a serious case of whiplash. While the markets cheered on Wednesday’s delay on auto sector levies, setting off an impressive late-day rally, the move also adds to the confusion about what comes next.The latest: There’s increasing buzz that agricultural products are next in line for tariff relief, as the president faces intense lobbying from his party. And the release on Wednesday of the Fed’s beige book survey of regional activity showed that companies were growing worried that the levies would push up prices.One school of thought on Trump’s tariff plans: they could level the field before negotiations. Trump himself sees them as a tool to bolster the U.S. economy.A way to think about this is to look at the people in his orbit. On tariffs, there are two key, and seemingly polar opposite, figures.There’s Howard Lutnick, the former head of Cantor Fitzgerald who is a moderate on trade and now commerce secretary. And there is Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump lieutenant and a proponent of high tariffs who is generally opposed to trade deals.Who has more influence? For now, it seems to be Lutnick. Trump’s announcement of a one-month pause on tariffs on cars coming through Canada and Mexico wouldn’t have surprised anyone who heard Lutnick’s comments earlier in the day.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