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      George Santos prosecutors seek seven-year prison term for campaign fraud

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      Prosecutors are seeking more than seven years in prison for disgraced former congressman George Santos after he pleaded guilty to federal fraud and identity theft charges.The US attorney for the eastern district of New York argued in a court filing on Friday that a significant sentence was warranted because the New York Republican’s “unparalleled crimes” had “made a mockery” of the country’s election system.“He lied to his campaign staff, his supporters, his putative employer and congressional colleagues, and the American public,” the office wrote. “From his creation of a wholly fictitious biography to his callous theft of money from elderly and impaired donors, Santos’s unrestrained greed and voracious appetite for fame enabled him to exploit the very system by which we select our representatives.”The office also argued that Santos had been “unrepentant and defiant” for years, dismissing the prosecution as a “witch-hunt” and refusing to resign from Congress as his web of lies was debunked.Even after pleading guilty before trial, prosecutors said his claims of remorse “ring hollow”, noting that he has not forfeited any of his ill-gotten gains or repaid any of his victims.“The volume of Santos’s lies and his extraordinary pattern of dishonesty speaks to his high likelihood of reoffending and the concomitant need to remove him from the community he has repeatedly victimized,” prosecutors wrote.The 87-month sentence proposed by prosecutors represents the high end of court guidelines in such cases. That would be roughly four to five years behind bars plus a mandatory minimum two-year sentence for aggravated identity theft, they said.Santos’ lawyers did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday, which was the deadline for both sides to submit their sentencing memos to court.A federal judge on Long Island is scheduled to hear arguments and decide on Santos’ sentence during a court hearing on 25 April.The once-rising Republican, who represented parts of Queens and Long Island, served barely a year in office before he was ousted by his House colleagues in 2023 – just the sixth congressperson ever expelled in the chamber’s history.Santos’ political demise came after it was revealed that he had fabricated much of his life story, leading to questions about how the political unknown had funded his winning campaign.The now-36-year-old cast himself as a wealthy businessman who had graduated from top colleges, worked at prestigious Wall Street firms and held a valuable real estate portfolio. In truth, he was struggling financially and faced eviction.Santos admitted in August that he duped voters, deceived donors and stole the identities of nearly a dozen people, including his own family members, to make donations to his congressional campaign.He was initially due to be sentenced in February, but a judge granted him a three-month reprieve to come up with more than half a million dollars in court fines.As part of his plea deal, Santos agreed to pay nearly $375,000 in restitution and $205,000 in forfeiture.Santos’s lawyers said at the time that he had little more than $1,000 in liquid assets and needed more time to build his newly launched podcast Pants on Fire in order to begin paying off the debt.Prosecutors maintain Santos profited handsomely from his infamy, arguing he has earned more than $800,000 from appearances on the video-sharing website Cameo and from a new documentary since his expulsion from Congress.Two of Santos’s campaign staffers have also pleaded guilty to federal charges in connection to the campaign financing scheme.Sam Miele, his former campaign fundraiser, was sentenced in March to one year and one day in federal prison. He admitted to impersonating a high-ranking congressional aide and charging donors’ credit cards without authorization while raising campaign cash for Santos.Nancy Marks, Santos’s former campaign treasurer, admitted she submitted to federal regulators bogus campaign finance reports filled with fake donors and even a fake $500,000 personal loan from Santos himself.The embellishments helped Santos hit campaign fundraising thresholds needed to qualify for financial backing from the national Republican party.Marks is due to be sentenced in May. More

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      Trump news at a glance: tariffs inflict more pain amid warning of rising prices

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      Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are roiling global financial markets, with stocks tumbling across the board from New York to London.Wall Street suffered its worst week since the onset of the Covid-19 crisis five years ago as investors worldwide balked at the US president’s risky bid to overhaul the global economy with the vast tariffs.Experts are all but unanimous that the impact on global growth of Wednesday’s extraordinary Rose Garden press conference will be negative – but just how bad remains highly uncertain.Here are the key stories at a glance:Dow drops more than 2,200 pointsDonald Trump doubled down on his plan on Friday, insisting he would not back down even as the chairman of the Federal Reserve warned it would likely raise prices and slow down economic growth.A stock-market rout continued apace, with the benchmark S&P 500 falling 322 points, or 6%, and the Dow Jones industrial average retreating 2,231.07 points, or 5.2%, in New York. The Dow’s two-day slump has wiped out $6.4tn in value, according to Dow Jones market data.Read the full storyChina hits back hard at ‘bullying’ TrumpChina has hit back hard against the US president’s “bullying” tariffs, raising fears that the escalating trade war could trigger a global recession and prompting fresh turmoil in financial markets.Beijing retaliated on Friday with punitive 34% additional tariffs on all goods imported from the US, mirroring the US decision and exacerbating a sell-off on global stock markets.Read the full storyFed chair defies Trump and warns of higher pricesDonald Trump’s global tariffs assault is set to raise prices and slow down economic growth, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell has warned, defying the US president’s demands for an immediate interest rate cut.Read the full storyDemocrats decry firing of national security chiefTop congressional Democrats are protesting against the firing of Gen Tim Haugh as director of the National Security Agency (NSA), with one lawmaker saying the decision “makes all of us less safe”.US defense department spokesperson Sean Parnell on Friday confirmed Haugh’s departure without elaborating on why.Read the full storySupreme court allows DEI cuts to teacher training grantsThe US supreme court is letting the Trump administration temporarily freeze $65m in teacher-training grants that would promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in a 5-4 decision.The ruling came down on Friday afternoon, with five of the court’s conservatives – justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh – in the majority. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all dissented.Read the full storyTikTok sale deadline movedDonald Trump said he would sign an executive order to extend the TikTok ban deadline. This is the second time the president will have delayed the ban or sale of the social media app, and will punt the deadline to 75 days from now.China put a possible deal on hold this week after Trump announced his sweeping tariffs, according to Reuters.Read the full storyUS ‘testing’ if Russia is serious about peace in Ukraine The US will know within weeks whether Russia is serious about pursuing peace with Ukraine, the secretary of state has said, warning that Donald Trump was not “going to fall into the trap of endless negotiations” with Moscow.“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace,” Marco Rubio told journalists in Brussels after talks with Nato allies. “Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later.”Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Chevron has been ordered to pay more than $744m in damages for destroying parts of south-east Louisiana’s coastal wetlands over the years. The ruling, which came in the form of a civil jury verdict on Friday, marks the conclusion of the first trial among 42 lawsuits filed about 12 years earlier.

      Texas on Friday reported another large jump in measles cases and hospitalizations, leaving the US with more than double the number of measles cases so far this year than it saw in all of 2024.

      Los Angeles county has reached a $4bn agreement to settle nearly 7,000 claims of sexual abuse in juvenile facilities since 1959, officials said on Friday. The agreement, which still needs approval from the Los Angeles county board of supervisors, would be the largest of its kind.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 3 April 2025. More

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      US supreme court allows Trump administration to freeze teacher-training grants

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      The US supreme court is letting the Trump administration temporarily freeze $65m in teacher-training grants that would promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in a 5-4 decision.The decision came down on Friday afternoon, with five of the court’s conservatives – Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh – in the majority. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson all dissented.In the unsigned opinion, the court said that the states made it clear “that they have the financial wherewithal to keep their programs running”, but the Trump administration had a strong case that it would not be able to reclaim any of the funds spent while the lower court’s order remained in place.The cuts to more than 100 programs had been temporarily blocked by a federal judge in Boston, who found that they were already affecting training programs aimed at addressing a nationwide teacher shortage. The federal appeals court in Boston turned away an appeal from the administration to allow them to resume.The emergency appeal is among several the high court is considering in which the justice department argues that lower-court judges have improperly obstructed Donald Trump’s agenda.Friday’s order was the first time in three attempts that the nation’s highest court gave the administration what it wanted on an emergency basis.US district judge Myong Joun issued a temporary restraining order sought by eight Democratic-led states that argued the cuts were probably driven by efforts from Trump’s administration to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.The Republican president also has signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the education department, and his administration has already started overhauling much of its work, including cutting dozens of contracts it dismissed as “woke” and wasteful.The two programs at issue – the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator Development – provide more than $600m in grants for teacher preparation programs, often in subject areas such as math, science and special education, the states have argued. They said data has shown the programs had led to increased teacher retention rates and ensured that educators remain in the profession beyond five years.Despite Joun’s finding that the programs already were being affected, the high court’s conservative majority wrote that the states can keep the programs running with their own money for now. By contrast, the majority said in an unsigned opinion, the federal government probably wouldn’t be able to recover the cash if it ultimately wins the lawsuit.
      Kagan wrote in dissent that there was no reason for the court’s emergency intervention.“Nowhere in its papers does the Government defend the legality of canceling the education grants at issue here,” Kagan wrote.In a separate opinion, Brown Jackson wrote: “It is beyond puzzling that a majority of Justices conceive of the government’s application as an emergency.”
      The administration halted the programs without notice in February. Joun, an appointee of Democratic president Joe Biden, found that the cancellations probably violated a federal law that requires a clear explanation.The appellate panel that rejected the administration’s request for a stay also was made up of judges appointed by Democrats.California is leading the ongoing lawsuit, joined by Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin.Boston public schools have already had to fire several full-time employees due to the loss of grant funding, and the College of New Jersey has also canceled the rest of its teacher-residency program. California State University has ended support for two dozen students in a similar program, and eliminated financial assistance for 50 incoming students. More

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      Democrats decry reported dismissal of NSA director Tim Haugh

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      Top congressional Democrats are protesting against the firing of Gen Tim Haugh as director of the National Security Agency (NSA), with one lawmaker saying the decision “makes all of us less safe”.Haugh and his civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, have been dismissed from their roles, the Washington Post reported late on Thursday, with CNN reporting likewise, both outlets citing multiple unnamed officials and other senior sources close to the matter who had requested anonymity.US defense department spokesperson Sean Parnell on Friday thanked Haugh “for his decades of service to our nation, culminating as US cyber command commander and National Security Agency director”.“We wish him and his family well,” Parnell’s statement said, confirming Haugh’s departure without elaborating on why.The ousting had not been officially confirmed by the government or the individuals by Friday afternoon, but the NSA website had been updated with both Haugh and Noble no longer listed in their roles.Lt Gen William J Hartman is now listed there as acting director of the NSA and Sheila Thomas as his acting deputy.Haugh also headed US Cyber Command, which coordinates the Pentagon’s cybersecurity operations. Hartman has been appointed acting head of the command, according to its website.The NSA notified congressional leadership and top lawmakers of the national security committees of Haugh’s firing late on Wednesday but did not give reasons, the Associated Press reported, citing a source. Senior military leaders were only informed on Thursday, the news agency said.The NSA declined to comment and referred the Guardian to the Department of Defense, which said it would provide more information when it became available.Outrage from critics was fulsome. Senator Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said in a statement: “General Haugh has served our country in uniform, with honor and distinction, for more than 30 years. At a time when the United States is facing unprecedented cyber threats … how does firing him make Americans any safer?”Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member on the House intelligence committee, said he was “deeply disturbed by the decision”.“I have known General Haugh to be an honest and forthright leader who followed the law and put national security first – I fear those are precisely the qualities that could lead to his firing in this administration,” Himes added. “The intelligence committee and the American people need an immediate explanation for this decision, which makes all of us less safe.”Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said Donald Trump “has given a priceless gift to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea by purging competence from our national security leadership”.“In addition to the other military leaders and national security officials Trump has fired, he is sending a chilling message throughout the ranks: don’t give your best military advice, or you may face consequences,” Reed added.Earlier on Thursday, Donald Trump said he had fired “some” White House National Security Council officials, a move that came a day after far-right activist Laura Loomer raised concerns directly to him about staff loyalty.Loomer, during her Oval Office conversation with Trump, urged the president to purge staffers she deemed insufficiently loyal to his “make America great again” agenda, according to several people familiar with the matter. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel manner.Loomer posted on X in the first moments of Friday morning: “NSA Director Tim Haugh and his deputy Wendy Noble have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired.”She added a screed about how they were hired by Joe Biden during his presidency and were, she said, “hand picked” by Mark Milley, then chair of the joint chiefs of staff, the most senior uniformed officer in the military. Milley served Trump in his first term in the White House but has since turned fiercely critical, calling the president dangerous and “fascist to the core”, and was fired in the early days of Trump’s second term. The 47th US president then also revoked Milley’s security clearance. Biden, the 46th US president, had preemptively pardoned Milley in his final days in office, following threats from Trump that the veteran was treasonous and should face the death penalty.Loomer added Haugh was “referred for firing” and Noble was Haugh’s “Obama loving protégé” who was nominated by Biden and promoted diversity, equity and inclusion at the agency. Loomer noted: “This is called VETTING”.She also said Noble was a protege of James Clapper, director of national intelligence in Barack Obama’s presidency, and said Clapper should be in prison.Trump spoke to reporters on Air Force One on Thursday afternoon after the earlier firing of six national security agency staffers below the level of Haugh and Noble, based on recommendations from Loomer, a extremist cheerleader for Trump and a white supremacist with an incendiary social media presence who has no political experience outside of unsuccessfully running for US Congress in Florida twice.“Always we’re letting go of people,” Trump said. “People that we don’t like or people that we don’t think can do the job or people that may have loyalties to somebody else.”The firings come as Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz continues to fight calls for his ouster after using the publicly available encrypted Signal app to discuss planning for the sensitive 15 March military operation targeting Houthi militants in Yemen.Warner said on Thursday night: “It is astonishing, too, that President Trump would fire the nonpartisan, experienced leader of the National Security Agency while still failing to hold any member of his team accountable for leaking classified information on a commercial messaging app – even as he apparently takes staffing direction on national security from a discredited conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office.”Haugh met last month with Elon Musk, whose so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, has roiled the federal government by slashing personnel and budgets at dozens of agencies. In a statement, the NSA said the meeting was intended to ensure both organizations were “aligned” with the new administration’s priorities.Haugh had led both the NSA and Cyber Command since 2023. Both departments play leading roles in the nation’s cybersecurity. The NSA also supports the military and other national security agencies by collecting and analysing a vast amount of data and information globally.Cyber Command is known as America’s first line of defence in cyberspace and also plans offensive cyber-operations for potential use against adversaries. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered the office to pause some offensive cyber-operations against Russia, in another sign of how Trump’s administration is transforming the work of the nation’s intelligence community.Renée Burton, a cybersecurity expert previously working for the NSA, told CNN the removal of the personnel was “alarming” and the disruption would “expose the country to new risk”.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Federal judge rules return of Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador prison

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      A federal judge on Friday afternoon ordered the US to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison after a Trump administration attorney was at a loss to explain what happened.The wife of the man, who was flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison had earlier joined dozens of supporters at a rally before a court hearing on Friday, where his lawyers had asked the judge – Paula Xinis – to order the Trump administration to return him to the US.Xinis on Friday called Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation “an illegal act” and pressed US justice department attorney Erez Reuveni for answers. Reuveni had few, if any, to offer, conceding that Abrego Garcia should not have been removed from the US and sent to El Salvador. He could not cite any authority held by the Trump administration to arrest Abrego Garcia in Maryland.“I’m also frustrated that I have no answers for you for a lot of these questions,” he said.Reuveni said, “I don’t know,” when asked why Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador, which has a history rife with human rights abuses.Abrego Garcia’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, hasn’t spoken to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She urged her supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.View image in fullscreen“To all the wives, mothers, children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain,” she said during the rally at a community center in Hyattsville, Maryland. “It’s a journey that no one ever should ever have to suffer, a nightmare that feels endless.”The campaign to reunite the couple will shift to a courtroom in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington DC.The White House has cast Abrego Garcia, 29, as an MS-13 gang member and assert that US courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because the Salvadoran national is no longer in the US.Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have countered that there is no evidence he was in MS-13. The allegation is based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation, described by the White House as an “administrative error”, has outraged many and raised concerns about expelling noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the US.Abrego Garcia had a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to legally work in the US, his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said. He served as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license.He fled El Salvador around 2011 because he and his family were facing threats by local gangs. In 2019, a US immigration judge granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador because he was likely to face gang persecution. He was released and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not appeal the decision or try to deport him to another country.Abrego Garcia later married Vasquez Sura. The couple are parents to their son and her two children from a previous relationship.“If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it all just to buy one thing: a phone call to hear Kilmar’s voice again,” Vasquez Sura said. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, I miss you so much, and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children.” More

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      Trump extends deadline for TikTok sale to non-Chinese buyer to avoid ban

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      Donald Trump said he will sign an executive order to extend the TikTok ban deadline. This is the second time the president will have delayed the ban or sale of the social media app, and will punt the deadline to 75 days from now.The TikTok deal “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed”, Trump announced on his Truth Social platform on Friday.ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, issued a statement in response to the executive order: “ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. Government regarding a potential solution for TikTok U.S. An agreement has not been executed. There are key matters to be resolved. Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”Congress passed a law last year forcing TikTok to either divest or sell its assets in the US. The law stemmed from concerns that the app’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, could use the social media platform to manipulate Americans. The first deadline to ban or force the sale of the app was 19 January. But, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order to delay that decision to 5 April. Now the new deadline will be in mid-June.Earlier this week, the president met with potential buyers for TikTok and said his administration is “very close” to a deal. Among those who’ve reportedly thrown in bids are a consortium of investors led by the software giant Oracle, asset manager Blackstone, Amazon, Walmart, billionaire Frank McCourt, a crypto foundation, and the founder of the adult website OnlyFans.TikTok is a tremendously popular social media app with 170 million users in the US. Investors and corporations see huge appeal with owning the app and its secretive algorithm.ByteDance has said it has no plans to sell TikTok and in previous court filings said a divestiture “is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not legally”.After announcing sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries, Trump hinted on Thursday aboard Air Force One that he might lessen the trade penalties on China if ByteDance were to approve a sale. The country faces a 54% tariff on goods imported to the US. “We have a situation with TikTok where China will probably say we’ll approve a deal, but will you do something on the tariffs. The tariffs give us great power to negotiate,” he said.In his Truth Social post Friday, Trump reiterated that sentiment, saying: “We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!).skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark,’” he continued. “We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” More

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      North Carolina judges back Republican colleague in bid to toss votes and overturn election

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      More than 65,000 people in North Carolina who believed they were eligible to vote could have their ballots thrown out nearly five months after election day, flipping the results of a supreme court election, a state appeals court ruled on Friday.The 2-1 ruling from the North Carolina court of appeals came in response to Republicans’ months-long effort to overturn the results of the state supreme court election in November. The Democrat Allison Riggs, who currently sits on the court, defeated appellate judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, by 734 votes. After the election, Griffin filed a protest seeking to get around 60,000 votes thrown out.Griffin currently sits on the North Carolina court of appeals – the body that issued Friday’s ruling. A panel of three of his colleagues heard the case.“To permit unlawful votes to be counted along with lawful ballots in contested elections effectively ‘disenfranchises’ those voters who cast legal ballots, at least where the counting of unlawful votes determines an election’s outcome,” Judges John Tyson and Fred Gore wrote for the majority.In a statement, Riggs said: “We will be promptly appealing this deeply misinformed decision that threatens to disenfranchise more than 65,000 lawful voters and sets a dangerous precedent, allowing disappointed politicians to thwart the will of the people.”The election is the only 2024 race still undecided.The state board of elections previously rejected Griffin’s request and a superior court judge upheld their decision. Friday’s ruling from the court of appeals overturned that ruling and ordered the state board to give challenged voters 15 days to prove their eligibility.When the case reaches the seven-member North Carolina supreme court, Riggs will be recused from hearing it. Without her, Republicans will have a 5-1 majority. If the court were to deadlock, the ruling from the court of appeals would stand.More than 60,000 of the voters challenged failed to provide either a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number on their voter registration forms. Another 5,500 challenged ballots came from overseas voters who had failed to provide ID.Republicans had filed a lawsuit making similar arguments ahead of election day last year and had it rejected. North Carolina has required the identifying information since 2004 to register to vote, but the state did not update its voter registration form until 2023.The ruling also said that voters who had never lived in the state, grew up overseas, and cast a ballot in the state were ineligible to vote and their votes should not count. That category of people typically includes children of North Carolinians who moved abroad before they turned 18.In a lengthy dissenting opinion, judge Toby Hampson noted that Griffin had not identified a single voter who cast a ballot who should not have been able to. Instead, he said, he was trying to change the rules around eligibility after the election.“The diligent actions these voters undertook to exercise their sacred fundamental right to vote was, indeed, the same as every other similarly situated voter exercising their voting right in the very same election,” he wrote.“Changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes in an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the constitution.”Hampson said he was doubtful that many voters would respond to a notice to prove their eligibility.“The proposition that a significant portion of these 61,682 voters will receive notice and timely take curative measures is a fiction that does not disguise the act of mass disenfranchisement the majority’s decision represents,” he wrote.Bob Phillips, the executive director of the North Carolina chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group, called the ruling a “disgrace” that “could disenfranchise tens of thousands of lawful voters and invite similar challenges nationwide”.Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the decision had “no legal basis and is an all-out assault on our democracy and the basic premise that voters decide who wins their elections, not the courts”. More

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      Trump insists he won’t back down from global trade war as markets slump

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      Donald Trump doubled down on his decision to launch a global trade war, declaring that he would “never” back off from sweeping tariffs on US trading partners.The US president’s announced action sent shock waves around the world this week, prompting fierce threats of retaliation and sharp sell-offs in stock markets.In an all-caps message on his Truth Social social media platform, Trump sought to convey his defiance in the wake of news that Beijing is preparing to hit back with 34% tariffs of its own.“TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” he claimed. “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!”Within hours, however, the president was indicating that he might be prepared to change course. “Just had a very productive call with To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that he looked forward to a meeting “in the near future”.The comments came as markets tumbled for the second straight day after Trump’s move to bring in tariffs on scores of countries. He claims the policy – a blanket 10% tariff from Saturday, with higher rates for specific markets from next week – will bring US manufacturing jobs back to the US and raise trillions of dollars for the federal government. Many economists have cautioned it will trigger economic chaos, and likely raise prices.The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the move may well knock the global economy. Kristalina Georgieva, its managing director, , said: “We are still assessing the macroeconomic implications of the announced tariff measures, but they clearly represent a significant risk to the global outlook at a time of sluggish growth.”Shortly before Wall Street opened on Friday, Trump claimed China had “panicked” by announcing new retaliatory tariffs on US imports. “CHINA PLAYED IT WRONG, THEY PANICKED – THE ONE THING THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO!” he wrote on Truth Social.China’s industry associations have unanimously condemned the tariffs. The country’s National Textile and Apparel Council said it “supported the government’s forceful measures” and that the US had “damaged the resilience of the global textile industry’s supply chain”.The S&P 500 fell 4.4% in early trading, exacerbating a decline that began in February. The index, which tracks 500 of the leading US companies, is now down almost 14% from its peak.Shares in the US bank sector had fallen nearly 6% on Friday, reflecting fears that the trade war could trigger a recession. It could also be an indicator that investors are expecting faster interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve, in order to instigate growth.Crude oil prices also plunged by 8% on Friday, heading for their lowest point since the middle of the pandemic in 2021.Trump personally selected the controversial formula for determining what tariffs would be imposed on specific countries from a menu of options, according to the Washington Post.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe chosen formula was based on two simple variables: the trade deficit with each country and the total value of its US exports.Several Trump aides had apparently been working on crafting country-specific tariffs for weeks, taking into account a broad range of tariff & non-tariff barriers. Sources told the Post that more sophisticated approaches had been developed.Trump reportedly didn’t decide on the final plan until around 1pm Wednesday – less than three hours ahead of his Rose Garden address announcing the tariffs. It is unclear who authored the formula Trump ultimately picked.The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, told reporters that the markets “will adjust” to the sweeping tariffs imposed by Trump. “The markets are reacting to a dramatic change in the global order in terms of trade … As long as they know what the rules are going to be moving forward … the markets will adjust.”Many Democrats have expressed frustration with the early impacts of the tariffs on the US economy. JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, wrote on X: “The biggest tax hike in American history. Donald Trump’s tariffs are throwing the economy into the tank.”California senator Alex Padilla wrote: “I’m not enraged by the stock market crashing because I’m sympathetic towards traders on Wall Street. I’m mad because this hurts the pensions and retirement savings of so many Americans. And Trump couldn’t care less.” More