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President Trump’s tariffs remain in place, at least for now, after an appeals court ruled that his administration can continue to collect import fees.The latest ruling came just a day after a separate court ruled that Trump had overstepped his power, a judgment that his administration has pushed back against.White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that America cannot function when diplomatic or trade negotiations are “railroaded by activist judges”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump wins breathing space after major blow to tariff policyThe Trump administration is racing to halt a major blow to the president’s sweeping tariffs after a US court ruled they “exceed any authority granted to the president.”A US trade court ruled the US president’s tariffs regime was illegal on Wednesday in a dramatic twist that could block Trump’s controversial global trade policy.On Thursday, an appeals court agreed to a temporary pause in the decision pending an appeal hearing. The Trump administration is expected to take the case to the supreme court if it loses.Read the full storyTrump allies rail against court’s tariff rulingRepublicans and close allies of Donald Trump are railing against a federal judicial panel that blocked a wide swath of the US president’s tariffs Wednesday night, including those against China.Some attempted to frame the decision as part of a broader fight between the Trump administration and US justice system. Trump has frequently complained about legal decisions that don’t go his way, attacking judges on social media in ways that have alarmed civic society experts.Read the full storyTariffs derailed by law firm that received money from Trump backersDonald Trump’s tariff policy was derailed by a libertarian public interest law firm that has received money from some of his richest backers.The Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit against the US president’s “reciprocal” tariffs on behalf of five small businesses, which it said were harmed by the policy.Previous backers of the firm include billionaires Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein, who were also financial backers of Trump’s presidential campaigns.Read the full storyChina condemns US decision to revoke student visasChina has lodged a formal protest over the US declaration that it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, with the foreign ministry saying it had objected to the announcement made a day earlier by Marco Rubio.Read the full storyFed asserts independence from Trump over interest ratesThe Federal Reserve issued a rare, strongly worded statement on Thursday after chair Jerome Powell spoke with Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday morning, holding firm on the central bank’s independence amid pressure from Trump to lower interest rates.The three-paragraph statement emphasized the Fed’s independent, non-partisan role in setting monetary policy based on economic data.“Chair Powell did not discuss his expectations for monetary policy, except to stress that the path of policy will depend entirely on incoming economic information and what that means for the outlook,” the statement read.Read the full storyTrump violating right to life with anti-environment orders, youth lawsuit saysTwenty two young Americans have filed a new lawsuit against the Trump administration over its anti-environment executive orders. By intentionally boosting oil and gas production and stymying carbon-free energy, federal officials are violating their constitutional rights to life and liberty, alleges the lawsuit, filed on Thursday.Read the full storyImmigration agents get quota to arrest 3,000 people a dayThe Trump administration has set aggressive new goals in its anti-immigration agenda, demanding that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day – or more than a million in a year.The new target, tripling arrest figures from earlier this year, was delivered to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) leaders by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, in a strained meeting last week.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:
Robert F Kennedy Jr’s flagship health commission report contains citations to studies that do not exist, according to an investigation by the US publication Notus.
Top House Democrat Jamie Raskin has demanded Donald Trump reveal a list of who attended his private dinner last week for major investors in his meme coin, as questions swirl about the deep and secretive connections between the Trump administration and the cryptocurrency industry.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 28 May 2025. More
If one thing is more challenging to the rule of law than a genuine emergency, it is the invention of a phoney one. Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has upended global trade and international relations, wiping billions off the stock market in the process, by imposing tariffs that he claims are a necessary response to an emergency. Yet that emergency does not really exist, except in the manner that Mr Trump himself has created it.The president claimed, on 2 April, that a lack of reciprocity in US overseas trade arrangements was “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States”. He claimed that this justified him in declaring an emergency and governing by executive decree under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Congress, which normally has the responsibility to decide US trade policy, was thus wholly ignored. Statutory consultative arrangements, traditionally an essential preliminary, went out of the window too. Mr Trump was effectively exercising an executive power grab.Now, after this week’s ruling by a US federal trade court, most of Mr Trump’s tariffs have been blocked. In a case brought by a coalition of businesses and US states, the court of international trade found that most of the tariffs “exceed any authority granted” to the president under the 1977 law. The White House will appeal. Meanwhile, trade talks aimed at creating so-called deals between the US and nation-state victims of the Trump policies are likely to be paused, while existing deals, including that with the UK, may be affected too.There will be a worldwide sense of relief for as long as it lasts. But the higher courts now face an important political responsibility as well as a judicial one. The ruling has left nations and businesses hanging. Some tariffs will remain, such as those on steel, aluminium and cars. Many others are suspended. Markets hate uncertainty.The issues at stake are very large. They are immediate, because the ruling suspends many but not all tariffs, and also strategic, because it challenges Mr Trump’s wide-ranging attempts to rule by executive order. Both are extremely important. Global trade and economic recovery, in Britain among many other countries, rest on the outcome. But so does Mr Trump’s strategy, which dates back to his first term, of using IEEPA powers to rule by decree, not merely on trade issues but, for example, in sanctioning officials from the international criminal court.The good news is that the president’s plans to impose tariffs on almost every country on the planet will now be subjected to something approaching the legal and constitutional scrutiny that they should have had in the first place. The rule of law, thankfully, has struck back, at least for now.The bad news is that Congress still shows no sign of reining Mr Trump in, as it should. Ironically, the IEEPA was originally a Jimmy Carter-era legislative attempt to boost congressional oversight of presidential emergency powers. Under Mr Trump, that role has been trashed. The worst of all outcomes would be for Congress to now give Mr Trump the powers to which he has laid claim. That is a real danger. The best outcome would be for Congress to give the IEEPA a fresh set of teeth. These would ensure that emergency powers are properly defined and applied, and never again abused by this or any other overmighty president.
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Trump Always Chickens Out – or Taco for short. Investors like narratives to explain the financial world, and they appear to have seized on this one: whenever Donald Trump faces a market backlash, he will back down.It would be fair to say the US president did not take kindly to the suggestion that he was being a “chicken” when asked by a reporter at the White House about the term that is gaining traction on Wall Street.“Oh isn’t that nice – ‘I chicken out.’ I’ve never heard that,” Trump mused on Wednesday in response to the reporter’s question on the so-called Taco trade. He then launched into extended comments on how high the tariffs he imposed on China were, and how he had “helped” China by cutting them.“But don’t ever say what you said,” he added to the reporter. “That’s a nasty question.” Apparently riled, he later returned to the theme, insisting that he was no chicken, and that often people accused him of being too tough.But recurrent retreats by Trump have become the basis for stock markets rebounding after falls, even as the US president has raised tariffs to their highest level in more than a century.The S&P 500, the US stock market benchmark, has gained about 1% during 2025, despite a deep slump in April as Trump announced “liberation day” tariffs on trade with most countries in the world.The stock market rise appears to have been aided by the Taco trade narrative: that market turmoil will correct the president’s course and allow companies to keep on making strong profits. That belief will strengthen if courts uphold Wednesday night’s ruling by New York’s court of international trade that Trump’s tariffs have been imposed illegally.When the Financial Times columnist Robert Armstrong coined the Taco acronym on 2 May, it was a pithy observation of market reaction to Trump’s chaotic policymaking. However, less than a month on, one question is whether being accused of being “chicken” will needle the president to take a harder line with trading partners.On some fronts – notably on transporting people to El Salvador without due process – the Trump administration has indeed defied barrages of criticism and several court orders. Yet on financial markets, the pattern is clear of a harsh initial position followed by a sizeable retreat. The partial climbdowns have often followed close behind slumping bond prices – increasing US government borrowing costs – a dynamic that could expose the world’s largest economy if left unchecked.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe liberation day tariff announcement was followed by a 90-day pause. Trump said he would raise EU tariffs to 50%, before delaying that until 9 July. He ratcheted up levies to a punitive 145% on China, before dropping them to 30% during a 90-day pause. And he toyed with forcing out the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, only to backtrack quickly once investor displeasure became clear.However, the market optimism has not matched economic forecasts, which suggest that the White House’s actions are still historically significant. More
Nothing is going according to plan for the Trump administration. The big, beautiful bill, originally vaunted to save the US taxpayer at least $2tn, so far, according to projections, delivers savings in the region of $9.4bn. Elon Musk has exited government, saying he wasn’t in favour of the bill, which could be big, or beautiful, but in this case, not both. Musk’s government contract ran for only 120 days, so it would have been up at the end of this week anyway.Just to try to lasso those words back to an observable reality where they might mean something, the bill isn’t all that big; there are some very vindictive moves around Medicaid entitlement, intended to fund tax cuts elsewhere, that will have seismically bad outcomes for vulnerable individuals without necessarily burning a hole in anyone else’s pocket. Tips and overtime are exempted from tax, but probably the only thing that’s legitimately big, or if you like, huge, is the increase of the debt ceiling by $4tn. So it gives with one hand, takes away with the other, promise-wise – those tax exemptions were mentioned often on the campaign trail, but a government that causes havoc trying to shrink the state while simultaneously increasing the amount it can borrow isn’t going to please anyone in either party but sycophants.As for “beautiful” – the supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap) will see reforms that throw more costs on to each state. Forty-two million low-income Americans are on Snap, and there would be more requirements upon those who are childless. Centring cuts on those who are already hungry has a cruelty that glisters in an age of necropolitics, but it lacks the scale, the granite finality, that “beauty” would connote to these people.“We have to get a lot of votes, we can’t be cutting – we need to get a lot of support,” Trump said, in response to Musk’s criticism, which seems to have enlivened in the president some fresh appreciation of how democracy works, though whether it will last until lunchtime is anyone’s guess. The worry about Musk’s departure is not that Doge will be lost without him, but that his criticism will embolden the hawks in Congress, who didn’t want to vote for the bill in the first place. Then it really will be a puddle of words without meaning.Meanwhile, a US federal court struck down almost all Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, in the classic judicial way, by deeming them an overreach of his powers. The ruling is purely on legislative grounds (Trump didn’t wait for the approval of Congress) rather than on any economic grounds (that they would make everything much more expensive for the US public, obliterating the impact of any big or beautiful tax cuts with a single big-ticket purchase, particularly if any part thereof was made in China, which means almost everything). The justice department has filed an appeal.The observer could file all this under “government: harder than it looks”. Moving fast and breaking things doesn’t work. Borrowing and spending while slashing and burning in a formless, ad hoc fashion doesn’t work. Billionaires with fragile egos, trying to cooperate while reserving the right to say whatever they like about each other, well, this has never worked.It would be the gravest imaginable mistake, though, to think that just because the wheels are coming off it this bus is losing its destructive power. One of the global indignities of the US spectacle is having to lose hours analysing the hidden meanings and augurs of the acts of men who don’t, themselves, give one second’s thought to anything. Did Trump mean to humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and if he didn’t, what came over him, and if he did, what could we predict of the future of Europe? Did Musk mean to Sieg Heil, and if he didn’t, has he lost his mind, and if he did, has he lost his mind? Did they mean to fall out, will they get back together, is this a pantomime, will one chase the other further from reality or back towards it?These questions fundamentally debase us, at the same time as giving the false sense of security that, once these guys step away from public life, singly or together, sense will be restored. The dangerous thing about them is the thing that makes them infinitely replaceable: there will always be another richest guy in the world; there will always be another high net-worth individual who has become separated from social values, not by the wealth itself but by the single-minded solipsism of its accretion. Trump and Musk could get to a place of such enmity that they eschewed the offices of state to spend the days mud-wrestling, and there would be no comfort to take from it, just a new double-act, with new peccadilloes that would be strikingly like the last.The federal court’s decision is another matter, and can be mutedly celebrated until it fails to act on some other gross constitutional transgression.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More
Science is under siege.On Friday evening, the White House released an executive order called Restoring Gold Standard Science. At face value, this order promises a commitment to federally funded research that is “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” and policy that is informed by “the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available”. But hidden beneath the scientific rhetoric is a plan that would destroy scientific independence in the US by giving political appointees the latitude to dismiss entire bodies of research and punish researchers who fail to fall in line with the current administration’s objectives. In other words: this is Fool’s-Gold Standard Science.According to the order, “Gold Standard Science means science conducted in a manner that is:(i) reproducible;(ii) transparent;(iii) communicative of error and uncertainty;(iv) collaborative and interdisciplinary;(v) skeptical of its findings and assumptions;(vi) structured for falsifiability of hypotheses;(vii) subject to unbiased peer review;(viii) accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and(ix) without conflicts of interest.”The order mimics the language of an active reform movement in science to increase rigor and transparency of research – a movement commonly called the open science movement, to which some of us are contributors. Science is, by nature, a continuous work in progress, constantly self-scrutinized and always looking for opportunities to improve. We should all be able to celebrate any administration’s investment in improving the openness, integrity and reproducibility of research.But, with this executive order, we cannot.Instead of being about open science, it grants administration-aligned political appointees the power to designate any research as scientific misconduct based on their own “judgment” and includes the power to punish the scientists involved accordingly; this would weaponize government counter to the public interest.The consequences of state-dictated science can be catastrophic. When Trofim Lysenko, a researcher who denied the reality of genetic inheritance and natural selection, won favor with Joseph Stalin and took control of agriculture in the Soviet Union, thousands of scientists who disagreed with him were fired, imprisoned or killed. His disastrous agricultural prescriptions ultimately led to famines that killed millions in the USSR and in China.Science does not proceed by sequentially establishing unassailable conclusions, but rather by steadily accumulating numerous lines of evidence, scrutinizing weaknesses, and pursuing additional evidence. Almost any study, any source of evidence, any conclusion, falls short of meeting every aspect of the White House’s list of best practices. This has nothing to do with laziness, let alone misconduct by individual scientists; it’s simply a consequence of the fact that science is difficult. Scientists constantly grapple with uncertainty, and nevertheless can ultimately arrive at robust, valid conclusions, such as the fact that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet and wreaking havoc on our climate.Under the terms of the executive order, political appointees loyal to the president can willfully find justification to label any research finding as scientific misconduct, and then penalize the researchers involved accordingly. This administration has already appropriated the language of open science to assert control over and deal heavy blows to the scientific ecosystem of the United States – including cancelling thousands of active research grants in climate science, misinformation and disinformation, vaccines, mental health, women’s health, LGBTQ+ health and stem education. Calls to “revisit” decades of work that establish vaccine safety beyond a shadow of a doubt “because the only way you can get good science is through replication”, and demands for unethical vaccine clinical trial practices and additional data, further echo the bad-faith adoption of open science language.Trump has also advanced a congressional budget calling for massive cuts to federal spending on research and development and levied significant retaliation against universities that have not fallen in line with his demands. He has gone so far as to propose a rule change by the office of personnel management that would install policy police at all levels of federal agencies, converting thousands of employees into presidential appointees who can be summarily fired without due process for any arbitrary political reason. This new executive order raises the concern that many of our best scientists would be targeted in Lysenkoist purges. Meanwhile, the threat of such actions is already having a chilling effect on all scientists.Science is the most important long-term investment for humanity. Interference in the scientific process by political arbiters stifles scientists’ freedom of speech and thought. Science depends on unfettered speech – free and continuous discussion of data and ideas. We, like the rest of the scientific community, aspire to achieve greater openness, integrity and reproducibility of research to accelerate discovery, advance treatments and foster solutions to meet society’s greatest challenges. Meeting that objective will not occur by centralizing power over science and scientists according to the whims of any political administration. We see this executive order for what it is: an attempt to sell the US’s future for pyrite.
Colette Delawalla is a PhD candidate at Emory University and executive director of Stand Up for Science. Victor Ambros is a 2024 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine at the Chan Medical School, University of Massachusetts. Carl Bergstrom is professor of biology at the University of Washington. Carol Greider is a 2009 Nobel laureate in medicine and distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Michael Mann is the presidential distinguished professor of earth and environmental science and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Brian Nosek is executive director of the Center for Open Science and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia More
After a rollout trumpeted by US officials, the US- and Israeli-backed effort that claimed it would return large-scale food deliveries to Gaza was born an orphan, with questions growing over its leadership, sources of funding and ties to Israeli officials and private US security contractors.The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had said it would securely provide food supplies to the Gaza Strip, ending an Israeli blockade that UN officials say have led to the brink of a famine.Instead, early reports and leaked video of its operations that began this week have depicted a scene of chaos, with crowds storming a distribution site and Israeli military officials confirming they had fired “warning shots” to restore order. Gaza health officials said at least one civilian had been killed and 48 injured in the incident.In a statement, GHF downplayed the episode, claimed there had been no casualties, and said it had distributed 14,550 food boxes, or 840,262 meals, according to its own calculations.But GHF had no experience distributing food in a famine zone, and as of Wednesday, its leadership remained opaque, if not deliberately obscure. A number of executives and board members have refuted links to the group or stepped down, including Jake Wood, the ex-Marine who previously headed the group. When he resigned on Sunday, he said that it “is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon”. The group named John Acree, a former senior official at USAID, as its interim executive director.Both a Geneva-based company and a Delaware-based company tied to the organisation are reportedly being dissolved, a GHF spokesperson told an investigative Israeli media outlet, increasing speculation over its initiators and sources of funding. The New York Times has reported that the idea for the group came from “Israeli officials in the earliest weeks of the war” as a way to undermine Hamas.And the US state department has also distanced itself from GHF’s operations, with a spokesperson saying she could not speak to the group’s chaotic rollout or what plans could be made to extend aid to hundreds of thousands more people in Gaza who would not receive aid.“This is not a state department effort. We don’t have a plan,” Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, said during a briefing on Tuesday when asked about plans to extend aid deliveries to those in the north of the Gaza Strip. “I’m not going to speculate or to say what they should or should not do.”She added that any questions about the group’s work should be addressed solely to the group.“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has an email,” Bruce said. “You can – they should be reached out to, and that’s what I’d recommend regarding plans to expand, plans to make assessments of what’s worked and what hasn’t at this point and what changes they might make. And what the goal is – clearly the goal is to reach as many people as possible.”But when contacted by the Guardian, the group said it couldn’t provide a representative for an interview and did not immediately respond to inquiries about its current leadership, where it was registered or its links to US security contractors.The group did defend its food distribution, denying Palestinian crowds had been fired upon or that anyone had been injured at its distribution sites.A statement sent to the Guardian from GHF said that under its protocol “for a brief moment the GHF team intentionally relaxed its security protocols to safeguard against crowd reactions to finally receiving food”.The group in part blamed the “pressure” on the distribution site due to “acute hunger and Hamas-imposed blockades, which create dangerous conditions outside the gates”.The statement did not address Israel’s role in preventing deliveries of aid.“Unfortunately, there are many parties who wish to see GHF fail,” the group said.The UN and other humanitarian organisations have refused to work with GHF, arguing that doing so would compromise efforts to reach civilians in all conflict zones, and put at risk both their teams and local people.“Yesterday, we saw tens of thousands of desperate people under fire, storming a militarized distribution point established on the rubble of their homes,” said Jonathan Whittall, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.Others have described the effort as an attempt to use deliveries of aid as a political weapon.Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said that the bloc opposed the “privatisation of the distribution of humanitarian aid. Humanitarian aid cannot be weaponized.” More
Donald Trump said he will be negotiating his signature tax bill after Elon Musk publicly criticised the president’s spending plan, saying it “undermines” cost-cutting efforts that the world’s richest man once spearheaded.Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Trump acknowledged the bill “needs to get a lot of support” in Congress, adding “we have to get a lot of votes”. The president also said he was “not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it” and confirmed he would be negotiating the legislation.The remarks come after Musk said he was “disappointed to see the massive spending bill, which increases the budget deficit … and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing” in comments made to CBS as part of a longer interview due to run on its Sunday morning programme this weekend.Musk had been leading the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) since January, which was given the task of cutting state spending. He later announced in April he would be stepping back from the Trump administration after Tesla’s earnings plunged, and spending millions of dollars in a supreme court race that his Republican candidate ultimately lost.Musk now appears to be hitting out at Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was narrowly approved last week by the House of Representatives.The bill pushes ahead with a number of Trump’s campaign promises, including extending tax cuts for individuals and corporations and ending clean energy incentives enacted under Joe Biden.It also involves about $1tn (£741bn) in cuts to benefits aimed at supporting struggling households, including a health insurance scheme for low-income families, Medicaid, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) food stamps.However, the bill also funds the construction of a wall along the border with Mexico, as well as staff and facilities for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Even when taking cuts into account, the bill is expected to add about $2.3tn to the deficit, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.Musk told CBS: “I think a bill can be big, or it can be beautiful. But I don’t know if it can be both. My personal opinion.”The comments will fuel rumours of a growing rift between the billionaire and the US president, whom Musk helped bankroll last year. In total, Musk’s super political action committee donated $200m to Trump’s presidential campaign before the November election, which many credit with helping to return Trump to the White House.Musk also has business interests at stake, with Trump’s bill due to end a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles and to impose a $250 annual registration fee for owners. The Tesla boss has previously called for an end to those incentives, although that was months before the EV maker’s earnings started to wobble.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast month, Tesla reported a 71% drop in first-quarter profits to $409m, compared with $1.39bn in the same period in 2024. Tesla’s stock has also suffered, with the company losing about a quarter of its market value since Musk took a top spot in Trump’s administration at the start of the year.Musk’s criticism is likely to fuel opposition by hardline Republicans, who threatened to block Trump’s legislation as it passes through the US senate unless the president rolls out deeper cuts that would reduce the national debt. One key senator, Rand Paul from Kentucky, told Fox News Sunday that the bill’s cuts were “wimpy and anaemic” and would “explode the debt”.However, Trump has already been treading on politically sensitive territory by supporting a bill that makes big cuts to programmes he promised to protect. He pledged multiple times on the campaign trail last year that he would not touch basic safety nets, including Medicaid.Some of the president’s “make America great again” supporters, including the former White House strategist Steve Bannon, have also warned against such a move, with one Missouri senator, Josh Hawley, saying that cutting health insurance for the working poor would be “politically suicidal”. More
