Trump gets tariff reprieve ahead of Musk Oval Office press conference later today
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next couple of hours or so.
Let’s start with the news that the 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 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.
The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on his whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.
Here’s the full report:
Meanwhile, the president is expected to hold a press conference with Elon Musk on what is supposed to be the tech billionaire’s final day working as part of the Trump administration.
Trump used his own Truth Social website to describe the X owner as “terrific” in what is clearly an attempt to quell rumours of a rift between the two men.
He wrote:
I am having a Press Conference tomorrow at 1:30 P.M. EST, with Elon Musk, at the Oval Office. This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific! See you tomorrow at the White House.
We will have all the key news lines, should any actually emerge, from that Oval Office presser later on.
In other developments:
-
One day after the nonprofit news site NOTUS discovered that at least seven of the studies cited in a new report from health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” commission do not exist, the report was quietly edited to remove at least some of the fiction.
-
China 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.
-
The 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.
-
Twenty 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.
-
The 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.
Key events
As we reported earlier, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are due to hold a joint press conference at 1.30pm ET on what is supposed to be officially the tech billionaire’s final day working as part of the Trump administration.
Trump used his own Truth Social website to describe the X owner as “terrific” in what is clearly an attempt to quell rumours of a rift between the two men. “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump wrote.
But after arriving the White House 130 days ago vowing to slash federal spending by $2tn (spoiler: he didn’t), “the thing that Musk has been most stunningly effective at slashing is his own reputation,” writes Guardian columnist Marina Hyde.
He arrived in Trump’s orbit as a somewhat mysterious man, widely regarded as a tech genius, and a titan of the age. He leaves it with vast numbers of people woken up to the fact he’s a weird and creepy breeding fetishist, who desperately pretends to be good at video games, and wasn’t remotely as key to Space X or Tesla’s engineering prowess as they’d vaguely thought. Also, with a number of them apparently convinced he had a botched penile implant. Rightly or wrongly convinced – sure. I’m just asking questions.
But look, it’s good news for Tesla investors, who have managed to end Musk’s practice of WFWH (working from White House), and are now demanding he puts in a 40-hour week to save the company whose stock he has spent the past few months tanking. As the world order dramatically seeks to rearrange itself in the new era of US unreliability, no one should ever be able to unsee the president of the United States’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a car sales lot for his sad friend. Did it work? It seems not. Musk spent a lot of this week airing his hurt feelings about his brrm-brrm cars. “People were burning Teslas,” he whined to Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post this week. “Why would you do that? That’s really uncool.”
Well, one thing we will no longer have to endure is this guy’s decrees on what is or isn’t cool. The timeworn thing about money and power is that they allow nerds to reinvent themselves as cool … What you rarely see is the alchemy of that process in reverse, live and in real time. But we got that with Elon, and we have to take our laughs where we can. In some other businesses, Musk could have convinced himself it wasn’t happening, but politics is a place where pollsters literally ask real people what they think of public figures every single week. Elon’s approval ratings are underwater.
Division between US and China is the biggest risk confronting world now, France’s Macron says
France’s president Emmanuel Macron has said that division between the United States and China, is the main risk currently confronting the world, as he emphasized the need for building new coalitions between Paris and partners in the Indo-Pacific.
Macron is visiting the region as France and the European Union aim to strengthen their commercial ties in Asia to offset uncertainty over Donald Trump’s tariff measures.
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s premier defence forum, alongside a two-day state visit to Singapore, Macron said:
I will be clear, France is a friend and an ally of the United States, and is a friend, and we do cooperate – even if sometimes we disagree and compete – with China.
The French president said Asia and Europe have a common interest in preventing the disintegration of the global order.
You have to choose a side. If we do so, we will kill the global order, and we will destroy methodically, all the institutions we created after the Second World War in order to preserve peace.
The time for non-alignment has undoubtedly passed, but the time for coalitions of action has come, and requires that countries capable of acting together give themselves every means to do so.
Macron is following leaders of China, Japan and other European countries in visiting the region in recent weeks, in a sign of south east Asia’s strategic importance amid uncertainties on global supply chains and trade.
Trump says China has ‘totally violated’ agreement with US on tariffs
Donald Trump has said China had “violated” an agreement on tariffs with the United States.
“China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US. So much for being Mr. NICE GUY!,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Trade talks between the US and China were “a bit stalled” and getting a deal over the finish line will likely need the direct involvement of Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News yesterday.
I think that given the magnitude of the talks, given the complexity, that this is going to require [the leaders of both countries] to weigh in with each other.
Two weeks after breakthrough negotiations in Geneva that resulted in a temporary truce in the trade war between the world’s two biggest economies, Bessent said progress since then has been slow, but said he expects more talks in the next few weeks.
I believe that we will be having more talks with [China] in the next few weeks and I believe we may at some point have a call between the president and [Xi Jinping].
He added that the pair had “a very good relationship” and he was “confident that the Chinese will come to the table when President Trump makes his preferences known”.
The US-China agreement to dial back triple-digit tit-for-tat tariffs for 90 days prompted a massive relief rally in global stocks. But it did nothing to address the underlying reasons for Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods, mainly longstanding US complaints about China’s state-dominated, export-driven economic model, leaving those issues for future talks.
US stock index futures dropped following Trump’s post this morning. Reuters reports that at 8:16am ET, Dow E-minis were down 153 points, or 0.36%, S&P 500 E-minis were down 26.5 points, or 0.45%, and Nasdaq 100 E-minis were down 102.75 points, or 0.48%.
Susan Rinkunas
The Republican nominee for governor of Virginia has recently tried to distance herself from her longstanding, hardline anti-abortion record, declining recently to state whether she would support any restrictions on abortion access if she is elected to lead the state this fall. But her record reveals a candidate staunchly opposed to the procedure.
Winsome Earle-Sears, now the state’s lieutenant governor, supported a 15-week abortion ban and has previously said she wants to make abortion illegal in almost all cases. In audio obtained by the Guardian, Earle-Sears also suggested an equivalence between consenting to sex and consenting to pregnancy.
Virginia is the only state in the US south without a strict abortion ban, and abortion is legal in the state through the end of the second trimester of pregnancy. The state’s current Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, previously failed to build support for a 15-week abortion ban, a framework Earle-Sears endorsed. While campaigning for lieutenant governor in January 2021, before Roe v Wade was overturned and support for abortion rights rose among the US public, Earle-Sears told a reporter that she considered abortion to be “genocide” and that she wanted to make abortion illegal in all cases unless the mother’s life was at risk.
But she has recently struck a different tone. In a local news interview last week, a reporter with WRIC 8News asked Earle-Sears about her past support for limiting abortion access. She replied: “I never said limiting access.” Sears, who is Black, then referenced abortion rates among Black women and asked: “Who doesn’t want us to have babies?”
When asked if she would sign a law banning abortion at 15 weeks or less, Earle-Sears said: “We’re not limiting access at all. That’s not what we’re saying. As a matter of fact, what we really need to do is get together and try to figure out, where is the limit?”
Dharna Noor
Twenty-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.
The federal government is engaging in unlawful executive overreach by breaching congressional mandates to protect ecosystems and public health, argue the plaintiffs, who are between the ages of seven and 25 and hail from the heavily climate-impacted states of Montana, Hawaii, Oregon, California and Florida. They also say officials’ emissions-increasing and science-suppressing orders have violated the state-created danger doctrine, a legal principle meant to prevent government actors from inflicting injury upon their citizens.
“At its core, this suit is about the health of children, it’s about the right to life, it’s about the right to form families,” said Julia Olson, attorney and founder of Our Children’s Trust, the non-profit law firm that brought the suit. “We all have constitutional rights, and if we don’t use our constitution – if we walk away from it and we walk away from our youth – we will not have a democracy.”
The lawsuit specifically targets three of the slew of pro-fossil fuel executive orders Trump has signed during his second term. Among them are two day-one Trump moves to declare a “national energy emergency” and “unleash American energy”, and another April order aimed at “reinvigorating” the domestic production of coal – the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel.
José Olivares
The 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.
The intense meeting, first reported by Axios and confirmed by the Guardian, involved Ice officials from enforcement and removal operations (ERO) and homeland security investigations (HSI) – both separate offices within DHS. ERO is in charge of immigration enforcement, including arrests, detention and deportation, while HSI typically focuses on investigating transnational crime, such as drug trafficking, human smuggling and the spread of online child abuse.
The 21 May meeting in Washington DC is the latest example of the increasing pressure being placed on officials nationwide to increase the number of arrests of immigrants, as the administration doubles down on its anti-immigration agenda.
The latest phase of the crackdown includes new tactics, such as mandating federal law enforcement agents outside Ice to assist in arrests and transports, more deputizing of compliant state and local law enforcement agencies, and arresting people at locations that were once protected, like courthouses.
Lauren Aratani
The 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.
Powell told Trump that he and other Fed officials “will set monetary policy, as required by law, to support maximum employment and stable prices and will make those decisions based solely on careful, objective, and non-political analysis”, according to the statement.
The United States plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taipei to a level exceeding president Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the democratic island, according to two US officials.
If US arms sales to Taiwan do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to the island, Reuters reported. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship.
The US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taipei over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of the officials saying arms sales notifications to Taiwan could “easily exceed” that earlier period.
They also said the United States is pressing members of Taiwan’s opposition parties not to oppose the government’s efforts to increase defense spending to 3% of the island’s economic output.
Trump administration considers allowing tariffs of up to 15% for 150 days, WSJ reports
President Donald Trump’s administration is considering a stopgap effort to impose tariffs on large parts of the global economy under an existing law that includes language allowing for tariffs of up to 15% for 150 days, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The administration has not made a final decision and it could wait to impose any plans after a federal appeals court on Thursday temporarily reinstated the most sweeping of Trump’s tariffs after a trade court ruling to immediately block them, the report added.
Lauren Aratani
Donald 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.
The center, based in Austin, Texas, describes itself as a libertarian non-profit litigation firm “that seeks to protect economic liberty, private property rights, free speech, and other fundamental rights”.
Previous backers of the firm include billionaires Robert Mercer and Richard Uihlein, who were also financial backers of Trump’s presidential campaigns.
Mercer, a hedge fund manager, was a key backer of Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, pouring millions into both companies. He personally directed Cambridge Analytica to focus on the Leave campaign during the UK’s Brexit referendum in 2016 that led to the UK leaving the European Union.
For its lawsuit against Trump’s tariffs, the Liberty Justice Center gathered five small businesses, including a wine company and a fish gear and apparel retailer, and argued that Trump overreached his executive authority and needed Congress’s approval to pass such broad tariffs.
Trump celebrates Nippon Steel ‘deal’ with rally at Pennsylvania plant
President Donald Trump heads to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Friday to headline a rally to celebrate Nippon Steel’s “planned partnership” with US Steel, signaling final approval for the deal could be on the horizon.
Proponents of the transaction are hoping his visit to the state where U.S. Steel is headquartered will cap a tumultuous 18-month effort by Nippon Steel to buy the iconic American company, beset by union opposition and two national security reviews, Reuters reported.
But the deal is possibly not entirely done. Following Trump’s post on Truth Social last Friday announcing the rally and appearing to endorse the merger, he sowed doubt on Sunday, describing the deal to reporters as an investment with “partial ownership,” with control residing with the US.
Trump will deliver remarks at a US Steel plant at 5pm ET on Friday in the political swing state, which he won in the 2024 election. The White House described his remarks as being about the “US Steel Deal.”
Trump attacks judges and accuses them of hating him
After a relatively long – for him – period of silence on his Truth Social platform, Trump resumed posting on Thursday, with a 500-word screed attacking the three judges who ruled against him over his tariffs policy.
Trump’s post began by noting that the order to unwind the tariffs had been paused temporarily by an appeals court, but then turned to baseless speculation that the three judges on the federal trade court must have been motivated by hatred for him.
“Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?” the president asked, without noting that he had appointed one of the judges himself in 2018.
He added:
It is only because of my successful use of Tariffs that many Trillions of Dollars have already begun pouring into the U.S.A. from other Countries, money that, without these Tariffs, we would not be able to get.
It is the difference between having a rich, prosperous, and successful United States of America, and quite the opposite. The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political!
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY. Backroom “hustlers” must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!
Trump’s curiosity as to what could possibly explain the decision did not, apparently, extend to reading any of the 49-page explanation written by the court, because his post did not deal with any of the legal issues raised in the opinion.
Trump gets tariff reprieve ahead of Musk Oval Office press conference later today
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next couple of hours or so.
Let’s start with the news that the 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 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.
The ruling by a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits argued Trump had exceeded his authority, leaving US trade policy dependent on his whims and unleashing economic chaos around the world.
Here’s the full report:
Meanwhile, the president is expected to hold a press conference with Elon Musk on what is supposed to be the tech billionaire’s final day working as part of the Trump administration.
Trump used his own Truth Social website to describe the X owner as “terrific” in what is clearly an attempt to quell rumours of a rift between the two men.
He wrote:
I am having a Press Conference tomorrow at 1:30 P.M. EST, with Elon Musk, at the Oval Office. This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way. Elon is terrific! See you tomorrow at the White House.
We will have all the key news lines, should any actually emerge, from that Oval Office presser later on.
In other developments:
-
One day after the nonprofit news site NOTUS discovered that at least seven of the studies cited in a new report from health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” commission do not exist, the report was quietly edited to remove at least some of the fiction.
-
China 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.
-
The 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.
-
Twenty 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.
-
The 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.
