Trump denounces court finding that his tariffs are illegal After a relatively long (for him) period of silence on his social media platform following his huge loss at the US court for international trade on Wednesday, Donald Trump resumed posting through it on Thursday, with a 500-word screed attacking the three judges who ruled against him.
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.
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 he does not deal with any of the legal issues raised in the opinion in his post.
Instead, Trump focuses on blaming the conservative activist Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society for recommending judges that have not allowed the president to break the law.
“The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political!” Trump wrote. “Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY.”
Key events
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Closing summary
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Closing summary We are winding down our live coverage of the day in US politics, but will return on Friday to bring you up to the minute descriptions of a scheduled Trump-Musk press conference and other unscheduled events. In the meantime, here are a few of today’s leading developments:
A federal appeals court granted the Trump administration’s request to keep Donald Trump’s tariffs in place, for now, one day after a trade court ruled that they are almost all illegal and must be stopped.
Trump attacked the judges who ruled against him on Wednesday, including one he appointed himself, and suggested that he had been misled by a powerful Republican activist who recommended judges to him in his first term.
Trump announced that Elon Musk is leaving the White House on Friday, but suggested that his work in “helping” the administration will continue. “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way”. Musk recently criticized the focus of Trump’s legislative agenda, the massive spending and tax cut bill that will increase the federal deficit by trillions.
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.
RFK Jr’s ‘MAHA’ report quietly edited to remove made-up sources 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.
One of the invented sources was a paper supposedly written by Dr. Katherine Keyes and published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics under the title “Changes in mental health and substance use among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic”.
Keyes, who does exist, is an epidemiology professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, but she confirmed to ABC News that no paper with that title was ever written by her. JAMA Pediatrics told the broadcaster that it had published no such paper.
A search of the commission’s report on Thursday shows that the reference to Keyes and the imaginary paper has been removed from the document.
At least one other imaginary paper, supposedly published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, has also been removed from the report.
“Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same”, Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the health department told ABC News.
Trump says Friday will be Musk’s last day, ‘but not really, because he will, always, be with us’ Donald Trump announced on Thursday that Elon Musk is leaving the White House, but suggested that his work in “helping” the administration will continue.
In a post on his social media platform, the president invited his fans to tune in on Friday for another Oval Office press conference with Musk. “This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way”, Trump wrote. “Elon is terrific!” he added.
Musk’s departure marks the end of his tenure as a special government employee, a role that comes with a built-in time limit of no more than 130 days of government service during any period of 365 consecutive days.
It also comes amid tensions over his public criticism of the massive spending bill Trump is trying to get through Congress. In an interview broadcast this week, Musk told David Pogue of CBS News that he was disappointed by the bill, which is projected to add nearly $4 trillion to the federal deficit, mainly through sweeping tax cuts for the rich. That spending, Musk said, undermines the work his so-called department of government efficiency has been doing to reduce federal spending.
Elon Musk criticized the spending bill Trump wants to sign in an interview with the CBS News tech journalist David Pogue. “I was like disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not decrease it, and undermines the work that the Doge team is doing,” Musk said. “I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but I don’t know if it can be both”.
The budget-cutting and downsizing team Musk called the “department of government efficiency”, to invoke a meme, 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.
Although the administration says that the effort to radically shrink the government will continue without Musk, one member of the team, software engineer Sahil Lavingia, told Reuters on Thursday that it will more likely “fizzle out” and “die wih a whimper” once Musk leaves. “So much of the appeal and allure was Elon.”
Lavingia said he expected Doge staffers to “just stop showing up to work. It’s like kids joining a startup that will go out of business in four months”.
Lavingia, who blogged about being fired from the team after 55 days for talking to the media, said that he was given close to no guidance when he was sent to work at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“I got dropped into the VA with an HP laptop. What are we supposed to do? What is the road map?” Lavingia said he asked, to no avail. “I felt like I was being pranked.”
Trump denounces court finding that his tariffs are illegal After a relatively long (for him) period of silence on his social media platform following his huge loss at the US court for international trade on Wednesday, Donald Trump resumed posting through it on Thursday, with a 500-word screed attacking the three judges who ruled against him.
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.
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 he does not deal with any of the legal issues raised in the opinion in his post.
Instead, Trump focuses on blaming the conservative activist Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society for recommending judges that have not allowed the president to break the law.
“The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political!” Trump wrote. “Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY.”
Trump nominates far-right blogger to lead government agency that protects whistle-blowers Donald Trump announced on his social media platform on Thursday that he is nominating the former Gateway Pundit blogger Paul Ingrassia to head the United States Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal ethics agency that protects whistle-blowers and enforces the Hatch Act.
The Hatch Act, a law that forbids executive branch employees from taking part in political activities while engaged in their official duties, is rarely enforced, but the ethics agency determined in 2019 that Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway had “repeatedly violated” the law by making political statements as a White House official and urged the president to fire her.
Trump did not act on that recommendation, but one of his first acts when he returned to power was to fire the special counsel, Hampton Dellinger. By law, Dellinger, who was confirmed by the Senate in 2024, was supposed to serve a five-year term and could only be “removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office”.
Dellinger was fired by email on 7 February without any indication as to why. He fought the dismissal in court, but ultimately dropped his suit after an appeals court cleared the way for Trump to remove him.
Ingrassia, a far-right lawyer and writer, has been the White House Liaison for Homeland Security since February. Before that, as the White House Liaison for the Department of Justice, Ingrassia when he went to the D.C. jail in Washington on the first day of Trump’s second term to welcome pardoned Trump supporters who had been convicted of crimes for their part in the January 6 riot.
According to his LinkedIn account, Ingrassia, who obtained a law degree from Cornell between stints as a writer for the Daily Caller and the Gateway Pundit blog, has twice been a fellow at the ultraconservative Claremont Institute think tank.
Ingrassia has claimed to be Trump’s favorite writer, and, as CNN reported, he published a discredited theory during the 2024 Republican primary claiming that Nikki Haley was not eligible to be president because her parents were not yet US citizens when she was born in South Carolina.
Ingrassia’s false claim, which was featured on Gateway Pundit, and shared by Trump, built on the spurious reasoning of another former Claremont fellow, John Eastman, who tried to argue in 2020 that Kamala Harris was not born a citizen in California because her parents were not citizens at the time.
CNN also reported that a the Twitter feed of a podcast Ingrassia co-hosted with his sister in 2020 called for “secession” if Trump’s legal challenges to the election he lost failed and even urged Trump “to declare martial law” to remain in office.
Border Patrol held family of six trying to leave US in windowless cell for 24 days, ACLU says A pregnant mother from Africa who has been waiting for her asylum claim to be heard since last year was detained by immigration officials in Washington state in a windowless cell for 24 days, along with her partner and the couple’s four children, the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
The family had been living in Seattle while their asylum claim was processed but decided last month to cross from Blaine, Washington, into Canada, as the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants ramped up. They were taken into custody by immigration officials and held in a single room in the Blaine Border Patrol Station from 26 April 26 to 20 May.
“They were detained because they were attempting to leave the country, which is what they thought the government wanted from them” David Montes, an ACLU Washington staff attorney, told OPB.
The six-person family had to share a single open toilet in the room. The mother, who is diabetic, is still breastfeeding her youngest child: an 11-month-old who was born in Washington state and is a US citizen under the birthright citizenship provision of the US constitution Donald Trump is trying to cancel.
“They had no ability to contest that they were being detained”, Angelina Godoy, of the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, told OPB. “They were just held — essentially kidnapped — and released by the government when they decided to do so.”
A border patrol spokesperson told the broadcaster the agency generally tries to process people it detains within three days.
Like Trump, White House economic adviser Hassett claims big things are coming in about two weeks According to Reuters, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett just told reporters that he expects some trade deals to be struck in the next week or two, and that he has been briefed on three such deals that were “about to happen”.
Hassett, the news agency notes, “declined to identify which countries might be involved”.
Earlier on Thursday, Hassett assured Fox Business that trade deals were imminent. “I saw, last week at the end of the week, three that were basically ready for the president’s decision” Hassett told Mario Bartiromo, one of Trump’s favorite hosts. “I don’t know if people have had that conversation with him yet, but yes, there are many, many deals coming and there are three that are, basically look like they’re done”.
But while Hassett’s statements continue to be treated as news, it is difficult to know how seriously to take his claims, given that it has now been exactly two weeks since he told the conservative talk radio host Andrew Wilkow: “We’ve got 24, 25 more deals that we’ll announce probably over the next two weeks.”
It is of course possible that Hassett will be proven right, this time, but another possibility is that the president’s economic advisor has adopted Trump’s favorite dodge of telling reporters that some sort of breakthrough is always just two weeks away.
As Bloomberg News reported in 2017, Trump insisted early in his first term that a range of problems were about to be solved in “two weeks”.
That March, for instance, Trump promised Tucker Carlson that his claim to have been wiretapped by the Obama administration was about to be proven correct. “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks”, he said. In early April 2017, Trump said: “We’re going to make an announcement in two weeks” on an infrastructure package. When no such package had materialized three weeks later, Trump said: “We’ve got the plan largely completed and we’ll be filing over the next two or three weeks”. The sweeping upgrade to US infrastructure did not arrive until Joe Biden was president.
In June of 2017, Bloomberg noted that it had been “15 weeks since Trump promised an aviation infrastructure proposal in two weeks”. Eight years later, Trump’s latest transportation secretary is currently promising to solve that same problem.
In the summer of 2020, as he ran for reelection during the pandemic, Trump told Fox News that he was about to make good on his promise to replace Obamacare and reform the nation’s immigration system. “We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan”, Trump said. “The decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before. And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks”, he added. No such plans were ever signed.
The pattern has continued into Trump’s second term.
“Do you trust President Putin?” Trump was asked by a reporter last month.
“I’ll let you know in about two weeks,” he replied. Pressed to elaborate on what he expected to happen in two weeks, Trump evaded the question. “Two weeks or less,” he said.
Five weeks later, when Trump was asked yesterday if the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, actually wants to end the war in Ukraine, he replied: “I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know in about two weeks, within two weeks”.
“It’ll take about a week and a half, two weeks” Trump said.
Donald Trump said he would know if Vladimir Putin wants to end the war in Ukraine “in about two weeks” on Wednesday. “That is the classic Donald Trump ‘two week’ response to a question about a deadline or a timeline”, the ABC News correspondent Karen Travers told viewers. “We’ve heard this from him before when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. He already put a two week deadline on that for the two sides to reach a peace agreement. That deadline came and went”.
In his remarks to reporters a few minutes ago, Trump’s chief trade adviser Peter Navarro tried hard to cast the legal challenges to the retaliatory and trafficking tariffs imposed unilaterally by the president as both political and illegitimate.
To that end, Navarro urged reporters to report his false claims that the 12 states that filed suit were all Democratic states representing coastal elites, and that the five importers that told the court the new import taxes posed a grave threat to their businesses all sold “crap from China”.
“A detail that you should put on your stories: I mean, how did this suit come about? Twelve states of this union sued and every single one of them is a blue state, from the left coast of Oregon and Washington to New York and Connecticut on the elitist coast”, Navarro said, wrongly. In fact, Washington was not a party to the suit, while Arizona and Nevada, states that both voted for Trump in the 2024 election and are not on either coast, were parties to the suit. Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, which joined the suit, are also not coastal states.
Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro lied to reporters outside the White House on Thursday. “The other parties to the suit were a bunch of importers who buy a bunch of cheap, subsidized crap from China”, Navarro added, also incorrectly.
The five owner-operated businesses that sued are: VOS Selections, a wine importer; FishUSA, Inc, which sells sportfishing tackle and related gear, from Canada, South Korea and Kenya, as well as China; Genova Pipe, which manufactures ABS pipe in the US using imported resin from South Korea and Taiwan; MicroKits LLC, which makes educational electronic kits and musical instruments in the US using imported components; and Terry Precision Cycling, which specializes in women’s cycling apparel.
White House will find a way to impose tariffs even if it loses in court, Navarro says Speaking to the media outside the White House, Trump’s chief trade adviser Peter Navarro said the administration “will respond forcefully” to the US trade court’s ruling on Trump’s tariff agenda and plans to “fight this all the way up the chain”.
The administration would seek to enact tariffs through other means if it ultimately loses the court fights over its trade policy, Navarro continued.
You can assume even if we lose, we will do it another way.
He said the tariffs would remain in place for now following a court stay and that the administration is still in talks with other countries to continue trade negotiations.
White House trade counselor Peter Navarro speaks to reporters at the White House. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP
Robert Mackey
On the federal appeals court’s ruling on Thursday that Trump’s tariffs can stay in place, for now, Raffi Melkonian, a federal appellate lawyer based in Houston, explains on social media that the temporary administrative stay of the order blocking the tariffs from the US court of international trade “does *not* mean the Court will block the order for the entire appeal”.
The text of the appeals court’s order says this: “The request for an immediate administrative stay is granted to the extent that the judgments and the permanent injunctions entered by the Court of International Trade in these cases are temporarily stayed until further notice while this court considers the motions papers.”
Of the 11 judges who approved the temporary stay, allowing Trump’s dozens of retaliatory and trafficking tariffs to remain in place, three were appointed by Republican presidents – one by George H.W. Bush and two by George W. Bush – and the other eight by Democratic presidents – one by Bill Clinton, five by Barack Obama and two by Joe Biden.
US court of appeals temporarily reinstates Trump’s tariffs during appeal
Dominic Rushe
An appeals court has agreed that Trump’s tariffs could remain in place pending an appeal hearing by the Trump administration.
A US trade court ruled yesterday that the tariff regime was illegal in a dramatic twist that could block Trump’s controversial global trade policy.
If the administration loses the appeal, it is expected to take the case to the supreme court.