Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will resume the work of chronicling it all in real time on Thursday. In the meantime, here are the day’s top developments:
All of Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal and must be removed, a three-judge panel at the US court of international trade ruled unanimously. The court found that the president simply does not have the sweeping power to impose tariffs he claimed and gave the administration 10 days to reverse all of his executive orders doing so. Sorry, Wall Street traders, no more Tacos.
“The US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said in a statement.
Trump nominated Emil Bove, his former personal attorney who previously defended him in the hush-money case and now holds a senior position in the justice department, to serve as a federal appeals judge.
Elon Musk’s work here is done, he said in a post on his social media platform, but the work of his so-called “department of government efficiency” will continue, despite its reputation for making headline-grabbing claims about supposedly wasteful spending it had discovered, almost all of which have proved to be either wildly exaggerated or simply untrue.
Trump’s pardon spree continued, with clemency granted to more political supporters convicted of financial fraud, including two of the president’s fellow reality TV stars and a former New York representative who once threatened a reporter with physical violence.
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Elon Musk says his work as a government employee is over
In a post on his social media platform, Elon Musk suggested on Wednesday that his formal role in the Trump administration is ending.
“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote. “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government”, referring to the budget-cutting and downsizing team he called the “department of government efficiency”, which earned a reputation for making headline-grabbing claims about supposedly wasteful spending it had discovered, almost all of which proved to be either wildly exaggerated or simply untrue.
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US health service stops work on mRNA vaccines to combat potential flu pandemic – report
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said recently that no one should be taking medical advice from him, but, according to the health news website Stat, Kennedy’s deep suspicion of the messenger RNA platform has led his department to cancel a nearly $600m contract with Moderna “to develop, test, and license vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics, including the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus”.
The cancellation was not unexpected, but it follows Kennedy’s decision to remove the federal recommendation for pregnant people and children to be vaccinated against Covid-19, suggesting that he is personally limiting the options for Americans who want to get vaccinated but rely on health insurance that will not pay for shots the government does not recommend.
For decades, since the 1918 flu pandemic killed millions of people, scientists have been preparing for the possibility that another pandemic strain of influenza could emerge. The order for Moderna to stop preparing to make mRNA vaccines for strains of the flu with pandemic potential will likely be seen as a setback for the nation’s pandemic preparedness.
In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States, Trump insisted that he had no idea that his own White House had eliminated a team responsible for global health security, which was created by his predecessor, Barack Obama, to coordinate the response to pandemic threats.
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The Washington Post reports that, despite what the Pentagon has said, “legal teams representing the US and Qatari governments have not finalized an agreement for transferring the luxury Boeing 747-8 jetliner that President Donald Trump wants for Air Force One amid outstanding requests by Qatar for Washington to clarify the transaction’s terms”.
According to the Post’s unnamed official sources, the issue is that “Qatar is insisting that a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Doha specify that the aircraft’s transfer was initiated by the Trump administration and that Qatar is not responsible for any future transfers of the plane’s ownership, these people said”.
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Trade court agrees that Trump exceeded his authority to impose tariffs
Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, is one of the lawyers who filed the successful suit against Trump’s tariffs on behalf of five US businesses that import goods.
In a response to the sweeping victory on Wednesday in the US court of international trade, which ruled that all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal and must be removed, Somin wrote in a post on the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy that the three-judge panel had agreed with him that the president simply does not have the authority to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress.
Somin drew attention to this part of the court’s unanimous opinion:
The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,’ and to ‘regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.’ U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cls. 1, 3. The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (‘IEEPA’) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country the court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.
“From the very beginning,” Somin wrote, “I have contended that the virtually limitless nature of the authority claimed by Trump is a key reason why courts must strike down the tariffs.”
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Trump has 10 days to rescind all tariffs, trade court rules
The US court of international trade judgment that all of Donald Trump’s executive orders imposing tariffs are “invalid as contrary to law” orders the administration to issue the necessary administrative orders to remove the tariffs “within 10 calendar days”.
The three-judge panel included Jane Restani, a Ronald Reagan appointee; Gary Katzmann, a Barack Obama appointee; and Timothy Reif, who was nominated by Trump in 2018 while serving as a senior advisor to Trump’s US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer.
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US trade court blocks Trump's tariffs
A federal trade court on Wednesday blocked Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law.
The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump had exceeded his authority, left US trade policy dependent on his whims, and unleashed economic chaos.
“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the court ruled, referring to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. “The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined.”
The panel, composed of judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Trump, questioned the US president’s use of the law, which does not mention tariffs. The ruling was per curiam, meaning that it was written on behalf of the full court.
Trump is the only president who has claimed the authority to impose import taxes based on the statute.
Tariffs must be approved by Congress, but Trump has asserted he has the power to act unilaterally because the country’s trade deficits amount to what he calls a national emergency.
The lawsuit was filed by a group of small businesses, including a wine importer, VOS Selections, whose owner has said the tariffs are having a major impact and his company may not survive.
Trump imposed tariffs on most of the countries in the world in an effort to reverse the US’s massive and longstanding trade deficits. He earlier put import taxes on goods from Canada, China and Mexico, claiming that it was necessary to combat the illegal trafficking of fentanyl into the United States. The court also blocked what it called the “trafficking tariffs” “because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders”.
The court also noted the wild swings in tariff levels, as Trump has announced and then backed down from high tariffs on specific countries or trading blocs over the past two months. The president was asked by a CNBC correspondent on Wednesday to respond to the fact that Wall Street analysts had started to refer to certain trades made in the expectation that he would impose and then back down from tariffs as “Taco trades”, an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. He was not happy to hear the phrase.
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Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, warned on Wednesday of the growing threat to press freedom by what she described as the Trump administration’s “campaign of censorship and control”.
Speaking in Los Angeles as part of her First Amendment tour, the commissioner said the agency had veered from its responsibility as an independent regulator, accusing it of using its authority to intimidate journalists and punish news outlets Donald Trump disapproves of.
“We’ve seen the FCC launch investigations into broadcasters because of their editorial decisions in their newsrooms,” she said at the event, organized by the media advocacy organization Free Press. “The point of all of these actions is to chill speech, to stop people from speaking out.”
Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed FCC chair, has opened investigations into PBS and NPR, ramped up the investigation into CBS for alleged “news distortion” of its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris and reinstated complaints against ABC News over the way it moderated the pre-election TV debate between Trump and Joe Biden. The FCC also opened an investigation into ABC’s parent company, NBCUniversal, and Disney, saying that the companies’ diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts may violate equal employment opportunity regulations.
“The point of all of these actions is to chill speech, to stop people from speaking out,” Gomez said, imploring the agency to “pivot away from these sham investigations” and return to its mission that initially drew her to the commission: helping broaden and improve internet and communication access for Americans.
Gomez said the pressure was having an effect. “I have broadcasters that tell me they tell the reporters to please be careful about how they report news about this administration,” she said. “That is exactly what I don’t want to hear.”
Commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms. Gomez, who was appointed by Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2023, may be risking her job by speaking out against an administration that has fired independent regulators and dissenting voices across the government. But she argued that it was her job to use her platform for as long as she had it.
“I like to say that if I get fired, it isn’t because I didn’t do my job,” Gomez said. “It’s because I insisted on doing it.”
Gomez said attacks on the press and free speech were far-reaching, pointing to the shuttering of outlets like Voice of America, attacks on unions and protesters, and investigations into law firms based on who they represent. She acknowledged the widening fear of dissent in government and civil society. But, she said, there was a reason to be hopeful.
“This administration has so much power right now – and yet this censorship and control comes from a position of fear,” Gomez said, after hearing from several attendees who raised a broad set of concerns that ranged from alarm over the crackdown on protesters to the democracy-eroding damage caused by the spread of misinformation online. “Dissent should actually make us stronger as a country.”
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US to 'aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students', Rubio says
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong,” Rubio added.
Rubio’s announcement thrilled at least one influential Trump supporter, the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who posted in response: “LET’S GO! DEPORT XI JINPING’S DAUGHTER!”
It is unclear if Loomer’s claim that the Chinese leader’s daughter, Xi Mingze, currently lives in Massachusetts is true – and given her history of spreading baseless conspiracy theories, it could well be false – but the she did graduate from Harvard in 2014.
“She had studied psychology and English and lived under an assumed name, her identity known only to a limited number of faculty and close friends—’less than ten,’ according to Kenji Minemura, a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun, who attended the commencement and wrote about Xi’s experience in America”, Evan Osnos reported on The New Yorker’s website in 2015.
Although Xi Mingze reportedly returned to Beijing after graduation, Osnos noted that a study of foreign students by the National Science Foundation found that 92% of Chinese graduates with American PhDs still lived in the US five years after graduation. For Indians, the figure was 81%, for South Koreans 41% and for Mexicans 32%.
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Justice department targets California for allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports
Donald Trump’s justice department announced on Wednesday that it is opening an investigation into allegations that the state of California, local education officials and a school district “are engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination on the basis of sex” by allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports.
The department said in a press release that a state law allowing transgender athletes to compete might violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools.
California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta; the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond; the Jurupa unified school district; and the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school sports, were all sent letters of legal notice about the investigation.
The announcement came one day after the president, reacting to a trans athlete’s success in a high school meet, posted on his social media platform that California “continues to ILLEGALLY allow” trans girls to compete in high school tournaments.
“Please be hereby advised that large scale Federal Funding will be held back, maybe permanently, if the Executive Order on this subject matter is not adhered to,” the president added. This was not the first time that Trump had mistakenly referred to his own executive orders as if they have the force of federal law, which they do not.
The justice department does, however, have the ability to charge states with violations of laws previously passed by Congress.
“Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education,” Harmeet Dhillon, the new assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” added Dhillon, a Republican operative from California who finished second in the race to be chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023.
The department also said that it had “filed a statement of interest in federal court in support of a lawsuit filed by and on behalf of girls’ athletes to advance the appropriate interpretation of Title IX to ensure equal educational opportunities and prevent discrimination based on sex in federally funded schools and athletic programs”.
That lawsuit, on behalf of two members of a girls’ cross-country team at a Riverside high school, was filed after a 16-year-old runner, identified as TS, was dropped to the junior varsity team after a transgender athlete the same age ran 52 seconds faster than she did the first time they competed.
TS and a younger teammate, identified as KS, reportedly got in trouble with the school for protesting the inclusion of their trans classmate by wearing shirts with the phrases “Save Girls’ Sports” and “It’s Common Sense. XX ≠ XY”.
The school’s athletic department forced the students to conceal or remove the shirts, likening them to swastikas.
“Every day, my child has to go to school and see kids in shirts in stanch opposition of who she is,” the parents of the trans athlete said in a statement to Spectrum News in December, when the suit was filed. “She began to see people she thought were her friends supporting a movement that rejected her.”
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Trump commutes sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader
Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader who had been serving multiple life sentences for more than five decades.
Hoover, 74, is the co-founder of Gangster Disciples, a gang described in court documents as “large and vicious” that sold “great quantities of cocaine, heroin, and other drugs in Chicago”.
He was convicted in 1973 for ordering the killing of a 19-year-old neighborhood drug dealer and given a sentence of 150 to 200 years.
In 1997, he was given six life sentences after being found guilty of federal drug conspiracy, extortion, money laundering and continuing to engage in a criminal enterprise.
He has been serving out his sentence at ADX Florence prison facility in Fremont county, Colorado.
The commutation, first reported by Notus, was confirmed by a White House official.
Read more:
Trump pardons Michael Grimm, Staten Island Republican who menaced reporter
Although the White House has yet to release the details, multiple reports say that Donald Trump’s pardon spree for political supporters has accelerated on Wednesday.
As first reported by NY1, the New York cable news channel, Trump has pardoned Michael Grimm, a Republican who represented Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn in Congress from 2011 to 2015.
Grimm, a former Marine and FBI agent, resigned from Congress after a tax fraud conviction.
He went on to work as a commentator on the pro-Trump cable news outlet Newsmax, and has recently dedicated his social media feed to praising Trump and his aides. “Who else thinks Stephen Miller is awesome!!? Reply with a [heart]!!” Grimm wrote on X above a portrait of Miller earlier this month.
During his stint in Congress, Grimm was perhaps best known for threatening to throw an NY1 reporter off a balcony in the Capitol after the reporter asked him to address an investigation into his campaign finances.
“Let me be clear to you. If you ever do that to me again, I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony,” he told the reporter, Michael Scotto, during the exchange, which was captured on video.
When the reporter pushed back, telling the then representative that it was a valid question, Grimm responded: “No. No. You’re not man enough. You’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.”
Last year, Grimm was paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown from a horse during a polo tournament.
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Trump pardons reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were convicted of bank fraud
Donald Trump signed pardons for reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who have been serving federal prison sentences since being convicted three years ago of bank fraud and tax evasion.
Savannah Chrisley, the couple’s daughter, posted an image on Instagram of what appeared to be Trump displaying the two signed pardons in the Oval Office.
A vocal Trump supporter, she endorsed Trump in a speech at the Republican national convention last year. Although she has called the case against her parents politically motivated, they were indicted in 2019 by BJay Pak, a US attorney nominated by Trump.
Trump’s pardons mean the couple best known for the TV series Chrisley Knows Best would be freed from federal prison. Todd Chrisley, 57, was incarcerated at a minimum-security prison camp in Pensacola, Florida. Julie Chrisley, 52, was imprisoned at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky.
In a post on X thanking the new US pardon attorney, the Republican operative Ed Martin, Savannah Chrisley wrote that her parents “are home”.
Prosecutors at the couple’s 2022 trial said the Chrisleys spent lavishly on high-priced cars, designer clothes, real estate and travel after taking out fraudulent bank loans worth millions of dollars and hiding their earnings from tax authorities.
The White House released video of Trump calling Savannah Chrisley to tell her that he was pardoning her parents on Tuesday, and saying they had been “given a pretty harsh treatment based on what I’m hearing”.
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Federal judge rules effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil likely unconstitutional
A federal judge in New Jersey said on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s bid to deport Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is likely unconstitutional.
The US district judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark, New Jersey, said he will issue a further order with next steps later on Wednesday, Reuters reports. Khalil is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana.
Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called it a “mixed ruling” on Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, because the judge wrote that he “is likely to succeed on his First Amendment claim, but likely to lose on a residency application issue. For that reason, the judge denied the request for a preliminary injunction, pending further briefing on the First Amendment issue.”
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Elon Musk tried to block Sam Altman’s big AI deal in the Middle East but Trump approved it anyway - WSJ
While OpenAI led a group of US tech giants who won a deal last week to build one of the world’s largest AI data centers in Abu Dhabi, behind the scenes Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup, people familiar with the matter have told the Wall Street Journal.
According to some of the people, “on a call with officials at UAE AI firm G42, Musk warned those assembled that their plan had no chance of Trump signing off on it unless Musk’s company xAI was included in the deal”, writes the WSJ.
The report goes on: “Musk had learned just before Trump’s mid-May tour of three Gulf countries that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman was going to be on the trip and that a deal in the UAE was in the works, and grew angry about it, according to White House officials. He then said he would also join the trip, and appeared alongside Trump in Saudi Arabia.
“After Musk’s complaints, Trump and US officials reviewed the deal terms and decided to move forward. The White House officials said Musk didn’t want a deal that seemed to benefit Altman. Aides discussed how to best calm Musk down, one of the officials said, because Trump and David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto adviser, wanted to announce the deal before the end of the president’s trip to the Middle East.”
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Federal judge bars Trump administration from killing New York congestion pricing program
A federal judge has blocked the US transportation department from withholding federal funding from New York as the Trump administration seeks to kill Manhattan’s congestion pricing program.
The US district judge Lewis Liman, who a day earlier issued a temporary restraining order, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from withholding approval of or funding for New York projects.
Liman said in his 109-page opinion that the transportation department had “challenged Plaintiffs to a game of chicken”, saying New York could either kill the program or “else may brace for impact and prepare to suffer the effects” of government compliance measures.
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The day so far
Donald Trump nominated Emil Bove, his former personal attorney who previously defended him in the hush-money case and now holds a senior position in the justice department, to serve as a federal appeals judge. Trump in a post on his social media platform Truth Social said he is nominating Bove, who serves as principal associate deputy attorney general, to serve as a judge on the Philadelphia-based third US circuit court of appeals. If confirmed by the Senate, this would be a lifetime appointment.
The Trump administration ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, the Financial Times (paywall) reports, citing several people familiar with the move.
Marco Rubio announced that the US will refuse visas to foreign officials who block Americans’ social media posts, as Donald Trump’s administration wages a new battle over “free speech”. The US secretary of state said he was acting against “flagrant censorship actions” overseas against US tech firms.
Trump said he will be negotiating his “big, beautiful” tax bill after Elon Musk criticized it. Musk publicly criticised the bill, saying the president’s spending plan undermines cost-cutting efforts that the tech billionaire spearheaded at Doge. Trump later said he will be negotiating the tax bill and is not happy with certain parts of it, and added that it “needs to get a lot of support … a lot of votes” in Congress.
The White House intends to send Congress a small spending package next week intended to formalize cuts made by Musk’s Doge team targeting federal spending, Politico reports.
Trump said Vladimir Putin may be intentionally delaying negotiations on a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine and expressed disappointment at continued Russian bombings. “We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not, and if he is, we’ll respond a little differently,” he said of Putin.
Trump said Harvard University should have a 15% cap on the number of foreign students it admits and that the Ivy League school needs to show the administration their current list of students from other countries. “Harvard has got to behave themselves,” he said. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper.”
Trump says he warned Benjamin Netanyahu last week not to take actions that could disrupt nuclear talks with Iran. “I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution now. That could change at any moment,” Trump said.
The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day, two sources familiar with a tense meeting at Ice headquarters last week have told Axios.
Termination notices are expected to go out to all remaining Voice of America employees this week, Politico reports. Those terminations would affect the 800 remaining workers at the embattled news network, after nearly 600 VOA contractors were dismissed by the Trump administration earlier this month. Employees have been advised by management to expect termination notices in the coming days. According to Politico’s report, the notices will probably mean the shutting down of the international broadcasting network.
Gen Michael Langley, the most senior American general overseeing the United States’ military presence in Africa, said that the US is currently reviewing the future of its armed presence on the continent. He also called on African countries to urge their ambassadors in Washington to let Trump officials know if they wish the US presence to be maintained.
A state department intelligence program that linked government analysts with outside experts has been quietly closed, part of the latest chapter of Trump’s disengagement with the broader academic and research community.
The Trump administration said it had agreed to end the US transportation department’s consideration of race or gender when awarding billions of dollars in federal highway and transit project funding set aside for disadvantaged small businesses.
China’s wariness of bitcoin should encourage the US to embrace the world’s largest cryptocurrency and build on its strategic advantage in the digital asset, JD Vance said in the keynote address to the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
Finally, Trump’s big, beautiful, new (and don’t forget, free!) plane from the government of Qatar has arrived in the US. He called the new jet a “beautiful, big, magnificent, free airplane for the United States air force”, and brushed off claims that it’s for his personal use, saying: “Frankly, it’s much too big.” It’s currently being “re-fitted for military standard”, Trump said, to what cost he didn’t know.
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Trump orders US chip designers to stop selling to China - Financial Times
The Trump administration has ordered US firms that offer software used to design semiconductors to stop selling their services to Chinese groups, the Financial Times (paywall) reports, citing several people familiar with the move.
Electronic design automation groups, which include Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, were told by the commerce department to stop supplying their tech, the report added.
The Bureau of Industry and Security issued the directive to the companies, according to people cited in the FT report.
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Trump nominates former personal attorney Emil Bove to serve as third circuit appeals court judge
Donald Trump has nominated Emil Bove, his former personal attorney who previously defended him in a criminal case stemming from hush money paid to an adult film star and now holds a senior position in the justice department, to serve as a federal appeals judge.
Trump in a post on his social media platform Truth Social said he is nominating Bove, who serves as principal associate deputy attorney general, to serve as a judge on the Philadelphia-based third US circuit court of appeals.
“He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote. “Emil Bove will never let you down!”
The New York Times first reported (paywall) last week that Trump was considering nominating Bove for a vacancy on the US court of appeals for the third circuit based in New Jersey. If confirmed by the Senate, this would be a lifetime appointment.
The announcement brings to six the number of judicial nominees the president has announced in his second term in office and the second for one of the 13 federal appeals courts that sit below the supreme court.
Trump is expected to have the chance to make more than 100 judicial nominations over the next four years, adding to the conservative stamp he made on the judiciary with 234 appointments during his first term.
Bove, a former federal prosecutor, represented Trump at his criminal trial in Manhattan last year alongside Todd Blanche, who is currently deputy attorney general. Trump was convicted on charges stemming from hush money paid to an adult film star, but is appealing.
During the early weeks of the Trump administration, before Blanche was confirmed for his position, Bove served as acting deputy attorney general.
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Earlier, we reported that Marco Rubio had announced that the US will refuse visas to foreign officials who block Americans’ social media posts, as Donald Trump’s administration wages a new battle over “free speech”.
The US secretary of state – who has rescinded visas for activists who criticize Israel and ramped up screening of foreign students’ social media – said he was acting against “flagrant censorship actions” overseas against US tech firms.
He did not publicly name any official who would be denied a visa under the new policy, but he did mention Europe and Latin America in his post on X:
Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.
Also earlier, I wrote that the Trump administration has been scrutinizing European legislation to regulate digital services and increasing pressure on the EU to roll such efforts back as part of tariff negotiations, claiming it amounts to a kind of digital censorship. The administration has also sharply criticized Germany and Britain for restricting what their governments term hate and abusive speech.
Agence France-Presse has more on the Latin American dimension of Rubio’s announcement, reporting that last week he suggested to US lawmakers that he was planning sanctions against a Brazilian supreme court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, who has battled X owner and Trump ally Elon Musk over alleged disinformation.
Social media regulation has become a rallying cry for many in the US on the right since Trump was suspended from Twitter, now X, and Facebook, on safety grounds after his supporters attacked the US Capitol following his defeat in the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
In Brazil, where supporters of Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro similarly stormed the presidential palace, congress and the supreme court in 2023 after Bolsonaro’s election loss, Moraes has said he is seeking to protect democracy through his judicial power.
Moraes temporarily blocked X across Brazil until it complied with his order to remove accounts accused of spreading disinformation.
More recently, he ordered a suspension of Rumble, a video-sharing platform popular with conservative and far-right voices over its refusal to block the account of a user based in the United States who was wanted for spreading disinformation.
Germany – whose foreign minister met today with Rubio – restricts online hate speech and misinformation, saying it has learned a lesson from its Nazi past and will ostracize extremists.
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JD Vance says US should use bitcoin to its advantage in rivalry with China
China’s wariness of bitcoin should encourage the US to embrace the world’s largest cryptocurrency and build on its strategic advantage in the digital asset, JD Vance said earlier today in comments reported by Reuters.
As the White House pushes for an overhaul of crypto policy, the vice-president said bitcoin will be a strategically important asset for the United States over the next decade.
Speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, Vance applauded Donald Trump’s executive order in March that created a strategic bitcoin reserve with tokens already owned by the government.
Crypto trading and mining has been banned in China since 2021. “The People’s Republic of China doesn’t like bitcoin. Well, we should be asking ourselves, why is that? Why is our biggest adversary such an opponent of bitcoin, and if the communist Republic of China is leaning away from bitcoin, then maybe the United States ought to be leaning into bitcoin,” he said.
Digital assets have enjoyed a resurgence under Trump, who courted cash from the crypto industry on the campaign trail by pledging to be a “crypto president”.
In his first week in office, Trump ordered the creation of a cryptocurrency working group to propose digital asset regulations. In March, he hosted a group of crypto executives at the White House.
Congress is considering legislation to create a regulatory framework for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the US dollar. The crypto industry has lobbied lawmakers to pass legislation creating new rules for digital assets and spent more than $119m backing pro-crypto congressional candidates in last year’s elections.
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US agrees to end use of race and gender in awarding highway and transit contracts
The Trump administration said it has agreed to end the US transportation department’s consideration of race or gender when awarding billions of dollars in federal highway and transit project funding set aside for disadvantaged small businesses, Reuters reports.
A judge in September in Kentucky ruled that a federal program enacted in 1983 that treats businesses owned by racial minorities and women as presumptively disadvantaged and eligible for such funding violated the US constitution’s equal protection guarantees.
The transportation department said in a court filing that it agreed the “program’s use of race- and sex-based presumptions is unconstitutional”.
The department previously defended the policy as seeking to remedy past discrimination but said it has reevaluated its position in light of factors including the supreme court’s decision in 2023 in an affirmative action case.
US district judge Gregory Van Tatenhove in Frankfort, Kentucky, an appointee of Republican former president George W Bush, said the federal government cannot classify people in ways that violate the principles of equal protection in the US constitution.
He relied in part on a ruling last year by the US supreme court
that effectively prohibited affirmative action policies long used in college admissions to raise the number of black, hispanic and other underrepresented minority students on American campuses.
The program was reauthorized in 2021 through then-president Joe Biden’s signature Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which set aside more than $37bn for that purpose.
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Trump administration closes state department’s office of analytic outreach
A state department intelligence program that linked government analysts with outside experts has been quietly closed, part of the latest chapter of Donald Trump’s disengagement with the broader academic and research community.
The office of analytic outreach, part of the department’s bureau of intelligence and research, held its final event on 22 May before closing permanently, according to an internal email seen by the Guardian, as part of Marco Rubio’s sweeping reorganization that will cut 15% of domestic staff and shutter 132 of the department’s 734 offices and bureaus.
“I am devastated we are not allowed to continue,” program officer Greg Otey wrote in the email. “We have experienced staggering growth in demand over the last few years with events now regularly drawing audiences of over 200 analysts and policymakers from across the federal government.”
The closure comes as the Trump administration targets programs it claims do not align with presidential priorities or that “represent radical causes”.
The shutdown eliminates another mechanism to enlist external expertise into government analysis, with the program serving as the intelligence community’s lead for connecting government leaders with academic experts, thinktanks and research institutions on foreign policy. It organized briefings for newly confirmed ambassadors and arranged analytic exchanges designed to inform executive branch policymakers.
The shuttering of the program also reflects broader tensions within the Trump administration over the role of outside expertise in government decision-making. The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, threatened yesterday to ban government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals, calling the Lancet, the New England Journal of Medicine and Jama “corrupt” and pledging to create state-run alternatives instead.
The state department did not respond to a request for comment.
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Gifted Qatar plane is in the US and is 'being refitted', says Trump, adding 'it's much too big' for personal use
Trump brings up his “beautiful, big, magnificent, free airplane for the United States air force”, and brushes off claims that it’s for his personal use, saying: “Frankly, it’s much too big”.
Asked if it’s going to be Air Force One, Trump only says it’s in the US and “is being refitted for military standard”. He admits he doesn’t know how much the refitting will cost but guesses “a hell of a lot less than building a new one”. He again blames Boeing delays to replacing the current one for him needing a new plane.
The United States formally accepted the Boeing 747-8 luxury jetliner – worth an estimated $400m – last week as a gift from the Qatari government and tasked the air force with upgrading it to be used as Air Force One.
NPR reported last week that the air force is “currently preparing to award a contract to modify a Boeing 747 aircraft for an executive airlift”, according to an air force spokesperson who said said further details about the contract are classified.
The White House claimed the plane was a gift to the Department of Defense and not a personal gift to Trump, and would go through the legal protocols required when something is given to the government. Trump has said he would not use it after leaving office but it would leave the air force as he has said he would like to keep it in his presidential library.
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Trump hesitant to impose new sanctions on Russia for fear of 'screwing up' a deal
Asked why he hasn’t imposed new sanctions on Russia, Trump says: “I think I’m close to getting a deal [to end the war], I don’t want to screw it up by doing that.”
“I’m a lot tougher than the people you’re talking about,” he adds. “But you have to know when to use that.”
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Trump says he would sit down with both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin “if it’s necessary” to end the war.
At this point … we’re working on President Putin and we’ll see where we are … I don’t like what’s happening.
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Trump says Harvard should have maybe a 15% cap on foreign students
Trump says Harvard University should have a 15% cap on the number of foreign students it admits and that the Ivy League school needs to show the administration their current list of students from other countries.
He adds:
Harvard has got to behave themselves. Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper.
Trump says he told Israel's Netanyahu not to act against Iran
Trump says he warned the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last week not to take actions that could disrupt nuclear talks with Iran.
I told him this would be inappropriate to do right now because we’re very close to a solution now. That could change at any moment.
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Trump says he will be negotiating the tax bill after Musk criticizes it
Trump is asked for his reaction to Elon Musk’s public criticisms of his “big, beautiful bill” – his signature tax and spending cuts bill which was narrowly approved by the House last week – saying Trump’s spending plan undermines Doge’s cost-cutting efforts to shrink the US budget deficit that Musk spearheaded.
Trump says the bill “needs to get a lot of support” in Congress, adding “we have to get a lot of votes”.
He says he will be negotiating the tax bill and is not happy with certain parts of it.
We will be negotiating that bill, and I’m not happy about certain aspects of it, but I’m thrilled by other aspects of it.
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Trump says he thinks there will be a “sensible” outcome t0 US-Iran nuclear talks.
He alludes to forceful action once again if the outcome is unfavorable to US interests:
There are only two outcomes: a smart outcome and a violent outcome. I don’t think anyone wants to see the second.
He adds Iran “still has to agree to the final stages of a document”.
The US envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, says they’re “on the precipice of sending out a new terms sheet” to hopefully be delivered today, and he has “some pretty good feelings” about getting to a temporary ceasefire in Gaza and a long-term peaceful resolution to the conflict. No further details, though.
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Trump says: “We’re dealing with the whole situation in Gaza. We’re getting food to the people of Gaza. It’s been a very nasty situation.”
He doesn’t give any further details.
'We'll respond differently' to Putin if 'he's tapping us along' on ending Ukraine war, says Trump
Trump says Vladimir Putin may be intentionally delaying negotiations on a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine and expresses disappointment at Russian bombings.
Asked if he thinks Putin wants to end the war, Trump tells reporters: “I can’t tell you that.” He then adds:
We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not, and if he is, we’ll respond a little differently.
He adds that he’s “very disappointed” at continued Russian bombing while ceasefire negotiations are taking place.
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Donald Trump is currently taking questions in the Oval Office, following the swearing-in of former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as interim US attorney for the district of Washington.
Termination notices expected to go out to all remaining Voice of America employees this week – Politico
Termination notices are expected to go out to all remaining Voice of America employees this week, Politico reports, citing four VOA employees familiar with the situation.
Those terminations, expected to go out as soon as later today, would affect the 800 remaining workers at the embattled news network, after nearly 600 VOA contractors were dismissed by the Trump administration earlier this month. Employees have been advised by management to expect termination notices in the coming days.
According to Politico’s report, the notices will probably mean the shutting down of the international broadcasting network.
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US 'assessing' future of military presence in Africa, says top general
Gen Michael Langley, the most senior American general overseeing the United States’ military presence in Africa, has said that the US is currently reviewing the future of its armed presence on the continent. He also called on African countries to urge their ambassadors in Washington to let Trump officials know if they wish the US presence to be maintained.
Langley was speaking at an annual gathering in Nairobi on Tuesday, attended by the most senior generals in Africa’s armies, where he said: “I’ve talked to a number of ministers of defence and a few presidents and told them we were assessing.” Langley added that if the US’s continued military role in Africa was important, African countries would need to “communicate that and we’ll see”.
The US is a key security partner for many African countries battling jihadist insurgencies across the continent, from Somalia to Nigeria. The announcement follows a report published late last year by risk analysts at Verisk Maplecroft, which identified a “conflict corridor” emerging from Mali to Somalia.
Donald Trump has been seeking ways to reduce the United States’ global military footprint since taking office earlier this year and, according to his vice-president, JD Vance, to focus solely on “core American interests” rather than open-ended conflicts or nation-building efforts.
During a Senate armed services committee evidence session last March, Langley was asked by Republican senator Rick Scott why Africa should be a concern for American policymakers. Langley told the committee that several African countries were on the “tipping point of actually being captured by the Russian Federation”. He added that north Africa formed Nato’s southern flank, and the US needed to maintain “access and influence” among those countries.
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White House to send Congress small spending package to formalize Doge cuts – Politico
The White House intends to send Congress a small spending package next week intended to formalize cuts made by Elon Musk’s Doge team targeting federal spending, Politico reports, citing senior GOP officials.
Two Republicans told the news outlet the “rescissions” bill will target NPR and PBS, as well as foreign aid agencies already hollowed out by the Trump administration through the Musk-led so-called “department of government efficiency”. But it’s worth noting that “the package set to land on Capitol Hill is expected to reflect only a fraction of the Doge cuts, which have already fallen far short of Musk’s multi-trillion-dollar aspirations,” Politico writes.
The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said on X earlier that the House “is eager and ready to act on Doge’s findings so we can deliver even more cuts to big government that President Trump wants and the American people demand”. He said the House “will act quickly” on a package without saying when it might be submitted or what it might contain.
It follows a long internal battle over how to formalize the cuts that have been made by Doge. Politico writes: “Republicans on Capitol Hill have been growing impatient as they await the White House request, after the Trump administration confirmed more than six weeks ago that it intended to send a more than $9bn package of proposed cutbacks. It’s unclear whether the forthcoming submission will meet that target, which is itself a tiny fraction of the $1.6tn in yearly discretionary spending.”
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Robert F Kennedy Jr has threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in the world’s leading medical journals, which he branded “corrupt”, and to instead create alternative publications run by the state.
The US health secretary said on the Ultimate Human podcast:
We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Jama and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt.
He accused the publications of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Instead, Kennedy outlined plans to launch government-run journals that would become “the pre-eminent journals” because National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding would anoint researchers “as a good, legitimate scientist”.
The three publications Kennedy targeted are among the most influential medical journals globally, established in the 19th century and now central to disseminating peer-reviewed medical research worldwide. The Lancet and Jama each report more than 30m annual website visits, while the New England Journal of Medicine claims more than 1 million weekly readers.
Kennedy has similarly accused the agencies he now oversees – including the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – as “sock puppets” for the pharmaceutical industry.
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Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard University president and former US treasury secretary, has issued a sharp statement criticizing Donald Trump’s attacks against the university.
In a post on X, Summers wrote:
I could have never conceived that the US President would be far more aggressive against a great university than he would be against a Russian dictator engaged in invading a US ally.
Why is it smart to starve cancer research, students on financial aid, innovation in public education and brilliant young people whose dream was to come to America while holding out the prospect of business deals to Vladimir Putin? I cannot imagine.
His comments came after the Trump administration directed federal agencies to cancel all government contracts with Harvard University worth an estimated $100m. Summers continued:
Totalizing efforts at destruction are never legal in America, and doing vast damage beyond their object is a reason the founding fathers separated powers.
The judiciary has to stop the overreach and support the reasonable enforcement of law with regard to Harvard and many other places.
House judiciary committee Republicans have welcomed Marco Rubio’s announcement about the US’s new visa restrictions policy, calling it “excellent news”.
In a post on X, the official X account for the House judiciary Republicans, they wrote:
We’ve been exposing foreign censorship efforts over the past year. Now, those who want to silence your speech are being held accountable.
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It’s all very unclear at this stage, but what we do know is that the Trump administration has been putting European legislation to regulate digital services under scrutiny and increasing pressure, claiming it amounts to a kind of digital censorship.
The European Digital Services Act (DSA) lays down new rules for online platforms, seeks to strengthen user rights and intends to hold tech companies to account. As part of tariff negotiations, the Trump administration has been trying to get the EU to roll back key digital regulations in defense of US tech giants (many of whom are, lest we forget, Trump backers), with a number of US officials calling the legislation “incompatible” with US free speech.
The EU has been determined to enforce the legislation, and Rubio does mention Europe in his X post. But we’ll of course bring you more clarity on this as we get it.
Here’s slightly more clarity on what this is about. In a statement announcing a new visa restriction policy targeting foreign nationals who “censor” Americans, Marco Rubio said:
It is unacceptable for foreign officials to issue or threaten arrest warrants on US citizens or US residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on US soil.
He said it was “similarly unacceptable” for foreign officials to demand content moderation from American tech platforms.
Marco Rubio announces new visa restriction policy for foreigners 'who are complicit in censoring Americans'
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has announced that the US will introduce new visa restrictions on “foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans”.
In a post on X, Rubio said that “Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights” and foreigners who “undermine” those rights “should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country”.
Here’s the full post:
For too long, Americans have been fined, harassed, and even charged by foreign authorities for exercising their free speech rights. Today, I am announcing a new visa restriction policy that will apply to foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans. Free speech is essential to the American way of life – a birthright over which foreign governments have no authority.
Foreigners who work to undermine the rights of Americans should not enjoy the privilege of traveling to our country. Whether in Latin America, Europe, or elsewhere, the days of passive treatment for those who work to undermine the rights of Americans are over.
It is unclear how this would work in practice.
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Key event
Trump has no plan for who will grow US food: ‘There is just flat out nobody to work’
Tareq Saghie
Last spring, Carmelo Mendez was pruning peach trees in Colorado on a temporary visa, missing his children and wife back home, but excited about how his $17.70 hourly wage would improve their lives. This spring, he’s back in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, frantically searching Facebook for a job on one of the thousands of farms across the US that primarily employ guest workers like him.
Mendez is one of the more than 300,000 foreign agricultural workers who comes to the US every year on an H-2A visa, which allows him to temporarily work plowing fields, pruning trees and harvesting crops in states from Washington to Georgia, Florida to New York, Texas to California. But as federal immigration policies change rapidly, farmers and workers alike are uncertain about their future.
“Without [this guest worker program], I believe agriculture in the US would decline a lot because people there don’t want to do the work,” Mendez said.
As the fate of the hundreds of thousands of undocumented farm workers remains in limbo amid Donald Trump’s mass deportation threats, and the administration’s H-2A policies are undecided, the future of these guest workers remains unclear. Their numbers grow each year – and they are increasingly central to an industry historically dominated by undocumented workers. The industry isn’t creating new jobs either.
Farmers agree with farm workers like Mendez. They say they cannot attract other workers to their rural fields.
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California changes high school sports rule after Trump post over trans athlete
The governing board for California high school sports is changing its competition rules at this weekend’s state track and field championships to allow more girls to take part amid controversy over the participation of a trans student athlete.
The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) said it was extending access for more “biological female” athletes to participate in the championship meet. The group announced the change on Tuesday after Donald Trump posted on his social media site about the participation of a trans athlete in the competition.
The federation didn’t specify whether the change applies to all events or only events in which a trans athlete has qualified for the final. The change only applies to this weekend’s competition. The organization didn’t immediately answer a question about how many students it expects will be affected by the change.
The rule change may be the first attempt nationally by a high school sports governing body to expand competition when trans athletes are participating, though the action is so far limited to a single meet.
In a social media post yesterday morning, Trump threatened to pull federal funding in California if the state did not bar trans students from participating in girls’ sports. The post referenced AB Hernandez, a trans athlete who competes in girls’ track and field. She is scheduled to compete in the girls’ varsity triple jump, high jump and long jump in the state finals this weekend.
“THIS IS NOT FAIR, AND TOTALLY DEMEANING TO WOMEN AND GIRLS,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s comments came months after Gavin Newsom, the California governor, said on his podcast that transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports was “deeply unfair”. Charlie Kirk, the conservative commentator who was a guest on the podcast, specifically referenced Hernandez when asking Newsom about the issue.
Trump said he planned to talk to Newsom about the issue on Tuesday. The governor’s office did not confirm the call but weighed in on the CIF rule change.
“CIF’s proposed pilot is a reasonable, respectful way to navigate a complex issue without compromising competitive fairness – a model worth pursuing,” Newsom’s spokesperson Izzy Gardon said. “The governor is encouraged by this thoughtful approach.”
Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem tell Ice to supercharge immigrant arrests to 3,000 a day – Axios
In a tense meeting at Ice headquarters in Washington DC last week, the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day, two sources familiar with the meeting have told Axios.
“The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term,” Axios writes, “and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations.”
Four people familiar with the 21 May meeting told the news agency that Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s increasingly aggressive immigration policy, “laid into” immigration officials – “demanding that field office directors and special agents in charge get arrest and deportation numbers up as much as possible, pointing to the waves of unauthorized immigrants who were able to enter the US during the Biden administration”.
Noem took a milder approach in pushing for more arrests, soliciting feedback from Ice leaders, whereas Miller’s “directive and tone had people leaving the meeting feeling their jobs could be in jeopardy if the new targets aren’t reached, two of the sources said. A third person said he was trying to motivate people with a harsh tone. But it’s not the first time Miller has yelled at senior DHS officials about getting arrest and deportation numbers up, sources said.”
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JD Vance to give keynote address to Las Vegas bitcoin conference
The vice-president, JD Vance, is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Vegas, which will set out the Trump administration’s turbocharged approach to the US crypto industry.
If you cast your minds back, it’s the same conference Trump spoke at last year in Nashville calling for America to become a “bitcoin superpower” and the “crypto capital of the planet” under his leadership.
Politico notes that at this year’s conference “the astonishing overlap between Trump’s political and personal interests will again be on display”.
At 4:30pm ET, Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr will speak at the very same conference in Vegas. It’s presumably an industry they feel invested in, given they back a major Bitcoin venture themselves, per Reuters. And it comes just a day after a separate family-linked business, the Trump Media & Technology Group, announced its intention to raise $2.5bn to invest in bitcoin, as the Wall Street Journal reports. And that in turn came after Trump offered out exclusive VIP dinner invites to the 220 top buyers of his personal $Trump memecoin, as an incentive to buy more stock. It’s all head-spinning stuff for a president of the United States.
What’s more, last night Vance headlined a Vegas fundraiser for Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac that required a donation of $1m per attendee, reports the Washington Post.
Today he’s due to speak at noon ET - I’ll bring you all the key lines here.
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White House cuts aid for states to modernize their unemployment insurance systems – Axios
The White House is terminating $400m in funds for states meant to modernize their unemployment insurance systems, Axios reports.
When unemployment soared during the Covid pandemic years, those systems fell apart, giving way to rampant fraud and delays for beneficiaries, Axios notes. “Without updates, similar problems could be on tap for the next recession.”
Congress authorized the funds in the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill passed in 2021, allocating $2bn for the efforts, later cutting that funding in half.
The Labor Department sent a notification letter to Congress last week to tell lawmakers “these grants are being terminated”. It claims that the money was being “wasted” on equity – ie per Axios, “efforts to make the unemployment insurance system easier for people to use and access, perhaps not what is typically considered DEI”, on which about $219m was used specifically.
Efforts to promote equitable access to unemployment insurance “include eliminating administrative barriers to benefit applications, reducing state workload backlogs, improving the timeliness of UC payments to eligible individuals, and ensuring equity in fraud prevention, detection, and recovery activities,” according to the labor department’s report.
$204m was awarded for IT modernization, $134m for fraud detection and $93m for system integrity, such as combating fraud and strengthening ID verification. Andrew Stettner, who led the modernization efforts during the Biden administration, told Axios that 18 states are working on updates to their systems and have barely begun to spend the funds allocated for IT.
Pulling this aid will be devastating for the states just getting started on these projects. “States were in the middle of all the planning and procurement. Now they’re really holding the bag for finishing,” Stettner said.
“The bottom line,” writes Axios, is that “in an effort to combat fraud, the Labor Department has pulled back money from states meant to help combat fraud”.
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A 43-year-old woman and mother of two with advanced cancer is experiencing life-or-death delays in treatment because of the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Institutes of Health.
Natalie Phelps, who has stage 4 colorectal cancer, has spoken publicly, raising the alarm about a setback in care for herself and others who are part of clinical trials run by the agency. Her story has made it into congressional hearings and spurred a spat between a Democratic senator and the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Behind the scenes, she and others are advocating to get her treatment started sooner.
So far, Phelps has been told that her treatment, which should have started around mid-June, will not begin until after mid-July.
“I’ve done everything I can do,” Phelps, who lives in Washington state, told the Guardian. “There’s nothing else I can do. I’m really just out of options. There’s very limited treatments approved for colorectal cancer.”
Phelps is one of many Americans whose lives have been disrupted or altered by the ongoing cuts to government services made by the Trump administration’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. Some NIH scientists have lost their jobs, and others have seen their grants ended. Researchers told the Associated Press that cuts to the agency and its programs would end treatment for cancer patients and delay cures and treatment discoveries.
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The Kremlin believes that Donald Trump was not fully informed about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said on Wednesday.
He was commenting on remarks by Trump that Vladimir Putin was “playing with fire” by refusing to engage in ceasefire talks with Kyiv.
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Trump asks supreme court to expand deportation powers
President Donald Trump asked the supreme court on Tuesday to make it easier for his administration to deport people to countries that aren’t their homeland or where they have legal status, such as South Sudan.
The request is part of a wider push to uphold controversial immigration policies before the conservative-majority court, CNN reported.
The challenged policy, enacted early in Trump’s term, allows the Department of Homeland Security to deport individuals to third countries without prior notice or the chance to argue they’d face persecution or harm there.
The appeal comes shortly after backlash over the attempted transfer of detainees to war-torn South Sudan without meaningful opportunity to contest their removal.
President Donald Trump’s envoy, Keith Kellogg, on Wednesday scolded a top Russian official for stoking fears of World War Three after Trump warned president Vladimir Putin was “playing with fire” over Ukraine.
As Russian forces advanced in Ukraine, Trump, in a post on Truth Social, said that Putin was playing with fire and cautioned that “REALLY BAD” things would have happened already to Russia if it was not for Trump himself.
“What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened in Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire,” Trump said in a Truth Social post on Tuesday.
Top Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev, a former president, dismissed Trump’s criticism.
President Donald Trump’s administration is raising scrutiny over the social media posts of South Korean students in the United States or who plan to study there, the students and agencies that support them said.
That has triggered concerns for parents of students studying or planning to study in the United States. South Korean students are the third-largest among international students in the US, behind those from India and China.
The US administration ordered its missions abroad to stop scheduling new appointments for student and exchange visitor visa applicants as the state department prepared to expand social media vetting of foreign students, according to an internal cable seen by Reuters on Tuesday.
The Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of wide-ranging efforts to meet its hardline immigration agenda.
“My clients, parents are calling me constantly today to figure out what is going on,” said Park Hyuntae, head of Worldnet US Overseas Edu Center, an agency in Seoul that assists South Korean students.
“Those who already scheduled those interviews and will apply for interviews both are worried, nervous, but cancellations of existing interviews haven’t happened yet as far as I know.”
Park said the visa interview pause could cause delays in starting the school year, and that he was advising clients to be cautious over what they post online.
Trump says it will cost $61bn for Canada to join Golden Dome scheme
President Donald Trump has apparently told Canada that to be part of his Golden Dome system, it will cost them $61bn – unless they become the 51st American state.
The president claimed they are “considering the offer”, which does not quite ring true given Canada’s repeated rebuffs of the US’s very public desire to annex it.
Trump posted:
I told Canada, which very much wants to be part of our fabulous Golden Dome System, that it will cost $61 Billion Dollars if they remain a separate, but unequal, Nation, but will cost ZERO DOLLARS if they become our cherished 51st State. They are considering the offer!
The so-called “Golden Dome” missile defense system will protect the United States from possible foreign strikes using ground and space-based weapons.
However, what exactly the Golden Dome will look like remains unclear. Trump has not yet decided which of three options proposed by the defense department he wants to pursue. Pentagon officials recently drafted three proposals – small, medium and large – for Trump to consider.
US stops scheduling visa interviews for foreign students
The US state department on Tuesday ordered the suspension of student visa processing, as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks unprecedented control of the nation’s universities by slashing funding and curbing international enrolment.
It is the latest escalation in the White House’s crackdown on foreign students, which has seen it revoke visas and deport some of those involved in protests against the war in Gaza, AFP reported.
A cable signed by secretary of state Marco Rubio and seen by AFP orders embassies and consulates not to allow “any additional student or exchange visa … appointment capacity until further guidance is issued.”
The government plans to ramp up vetting of the social media profiles of international applicants to US universities, the cable said. The New York Times reported that the suspension of interviews with visa applicants was temporary.
Rubio earlier rescinded hundreds of visas and the Trump administration has moved to bar Harvard University from admitting non-Americans. Japan and Hong Kong have both urged local universities to accept foreign students from US universities in light of the crackdown.
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning on Wednesday said Beijing urged Washington to “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of international students, including those from China.”
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students attend US universities, long viewed by many in China as beacons of academic freedom and rigour.
Elon Musk criticizes Trump’s tax bill
Good morning and welcome to the US politics blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that Elon Musk has been critical Donald Trump’s flagship tax reform, arguing that it undermines efforts by the government’s own efficiency team (Doge).
His comments risk deepening the divide between the billionaire entrepreneur and the president he financially supported during the last election cycle.
In a CBS Sunday Morning interview preview released on Tuesday evening, the Tesla CEO expressed frustration over what he called a “massive spending bill” that adds to the federal deficit and, in his view, negates the achievements of the Department of Government Efficiency, which he once headed up.
The legislation – hailed by Trump as his “big beautiful bill” – narrowly passed the House of Representatives last week by a single vote, marking a key legislative win in his second term. The bill is now awaiting a Senate vote.
President Trump, who had to pressure several hesitant Republican lawmakers to secure support, hailed the bill as “arguably the most significant piece of legislation that will ever be signed in the history of our country.”
To read our full story, see here:
In other news:
The Trump administration ordered US embassies worldwide to immediately stop scheduling visa interviews for foreign students as it prepares to implement comprehensive social media screening for all international applicants. The state department has also halted the scheduling of new visa interviews for foreign students hoping to study in the US. Here’s an explainer on the latest move against foreign students.
President Donald Trump is set to pardon reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley of fraud and tax evasion convictions. Margo Martin, special assistant to Trump, posted a video on X, of the president calling Savannah Chrisley to announce his pardon of her parents. In 2019, the Chrisleys were indicted by a federal grand jury on 12 counts of bank and wire fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy, all of which they have denied.
A judge in Washington struck down an executive order targeting law firm WilmerHale, marking the third ruling to overwhelmingly reject President Donald Trump‘s efforts to punish firms he perceives as enemies of his administration. WilmerHale is the former home of Robert Mueller, the Republican-appointed special counsel who led a probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and Trump campaign ties to Moscow. Trump has derided the investigation as a political “witch hunt.”
Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville announced he is running for Alabama governor in 2026. In 2016, he was still working as the University of Cincinnati’s head football coach, and he previously coached at Auburn University in Alabama. In 2020, he won a seat representing Alabama in the United States Senate, his first stint into elected office. Tuberville is looking to succeed term-limited Republican Governor Kay Ivey.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to halt an order allowing migrants to challenge their deportations to South Sudan, an appeal that came hours after the judge suggested the Trump administration was “manufacturing” chaos and said he hoped that “reason can get the better of rhetoric.” Judge Brian Murphy in Boston found the White House violated a court order with a deportation flight to the chaotic African nation carrying people from other countries who had been convicted of crimes in the US. He said those migrants must get a real chance to be heard if they fear being sent there could put them in danger, he said.
Top Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev, responding to Donald Trump’s warning that Vladimir Putin is “playing with fire”, said that the only truly bad thing to worry about was World War Three. “Regarding Trump’s words about Putin “playing with fire” and “really bad things” happening to Russia. I only know of one REALLY BAD thing — WWIII. I hope Trump understands this!” Medvedev wrote on X.
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