I was battered and bruised, but the king was amused / and before the siesta, he made me his jester / and I found out soon, that to be a buffoon / was a serious thing as a rule! / For a jester's chief employment, is to kill himself for your enjoyment / and a jester unemployed is nobody's fool!
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The New Jersey Democrat has held the floor since Monday night in protest of President Donald Trump.
Cory Booker wrote himself into the Senate annals Tuesday, setting a new record for the chamber’s longest speech when he held the floor for more than 24 hours and surpassed the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 1957 filibuster against civil rights.
The New Jersey Democrat took the floor at 6:59 p.m. on Monday, saying he was doing so with the “intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able” in order to protest the actions of President Donald Trump and his administration.
“Our constituents are asking us to acknowledge that this is a crisis. So I am going to stand here until I no longer can,” Booker said.
As of 7:18 p.m. Tuesday, he surpassed Thurmond’s 1957 speech, which lasted 24 hours and 18 minutes, according to the Senate historian. Booker is still speaking from the Senate floor.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a moderate Republican, congratulated her colleague, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), on setting the new record for longest Senate floor speech on Tuesday.
“Whether you agree with him or not, the past 24+ hours was what most people think a filibuster actually looks like,” Murkowski wrote in a post on X, shortly after Booker set his record.
“Congratulations to @SenBooker for his historic feat (while staying on his feet!),” she added.
Booker, the No. 4 Democrat in the Senate, took the floor at 7 p.m. on Monday and spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, finally yielding the floor at 8:05 p.m. on Tuesday.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said on Tuesday he was determined to surpass Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) prior record for longest Senate floor speech in history, saying it “irked” him that the late senator made history by trying to block civil rights legislation in the 1950s.
“To be candid, Strom Thurmond’s record always kind of, just, just really irked me, that he would be the longest speech — that the longest speech, on our great Senate floor, was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate,” Booker said on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” in his first interview after spending more than 25 hours holding the Senate floor.
“So to surpass that was something I didn’t know if we could do, but it was something that was really, once we got closer, became more and more important to me,” Booker said.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Tuesday said Democrats “have to take some responsibility” for the current state of the country, during his first interview after setting a new record for the longest Senate floor speech in history.
In an interview on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Booker said he was inspired to speak on the Senate floor for 25 hours and 5 minutes after listening to his angry constituents demanding Democrats do more to counter President Trump and his agenda.
“I do really credit constituents, who were impatient, who were demanding, who were scared, who were angry, and, very understandably, taking that anger out on Democrats, who have to take some responsibility for being where we are in American history right now,” Booker told Maddow.
He said he has been working with his team in the Senate to try and increase online engagement and encourage his fellow Senators to “put more of their heart and spirit out there” on social media.
U.S. manufacturers are sounding worried about the Trump administration’s trade policies ahead of a hotly anticipated announcement on tariffs that’s expected from the White House on Wednesday.
Makers of chemical products, electronics, metals, machinery, foods and transportation equipment all expressed concerns about tariffs in Tuesday’s manufacturing purchasing managers index from ISM, a monthly business survey.
The survey showed manufacturing activity contracting in March, continuing a 26-month downward trend after expansions in January and February.
“Customers are pulling in orders due to anxiety about continued tariffs and pricing pressures,” one survey respondent in the computer and electronics sector said.
“[We are] starting to see slower-than-normal sales in Canada, and concerns of Canadians boycotting U.S. products could become a reality,” another respondent in the food and beverage sector said.
Jake Rakov is running against his ex-boss, Rep. Brad Sherman, a 15-term incumbent representing Los Angeles’ fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades.
Another House Democrat is getting an age-driven primary challenge.
Jake Rakov, a former staffer to Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), is launching a bid Wednesday to oust his one-time boss. Rakov, 37, is part of a string of Democrats waging intra-party battles against a long-time House incumbents by calling for a generational change in leadership.
Standing in front of a Los Angeles structure decimated by wildfire, Rakov used a 2.5-minute long launch video to blast Sherman, 70, as out of touch with his constituents and unwilling to mount a meaningful resistance against President Donald Trump’s “MAGA hellscape.”
“He and people like him, who have stayed on for so long, who don’t even check into the district anymore,” Rakov said in an interview with POLITICO, “are why we have Trump twice, and why our party is so bad at fighting back against him now.”
The former state attorney general plans on making his decades-long political resume a central selling point in his campaign.
Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary under President Joe Biden, is joining the burgeoning field to be California’s next governor — regardless of whether Kamala Harris seeks the post.
The former California attorney general, who has been mulling a run for the state’s top job for at least a year, launched his bid in a brief video on Wednesday shared first to POLITICO.
“I watched my parents — a construction worker and a clerical worker — achieve the California dream,” Becerra said in a bare-bones, direct-to-camera clip. “Can we do that today, with this affordability crisis? Very tough. But we’ve taken on these tough fights … We can do that, but you need a leader who can be tough.”
Becerra’s entrance into the race injects new intrigue into a contest that for months had been stagnant as Democrats and their deep-pocketed funders wait to see if the former vice president will jump into the fray. But recently the campaign has seen stirrings; former Rep. Katie Porter launched her own bid last month and and other contenders have taken increasingly pointed swipes at Harris and her drawn-out decision timeline.
The rising star Democrat enters what could be the most contested race of 2026.
Democrat Mallory McMorrow formally launched a bid on Wednesday to succeed retiring Michigan Sen. Gary Peters.
The state senator framed herself as an outsider, declaring that the “same old crap out of Washington” wouldn’t fix their problems.
“We need new leaders. Because the same people in D.C. who got us into this mess are not going to be the ones to get us out of it,” she said in a two-and-a-half minute announcement video.
McMorrow, 38, is seen in the party as an effective communicator and a rising star. She attracted attention at last year’s Democratic National Convention after holding up an oversized copy of “Project 2025,” the conservative policy blueprint that ultimately became the backbone of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to government spending.
The tech billionaire became a huge focus of a state Supreme Court race. It turned out to help Democrats a lot.
Democrats just won their biggest electoral victory of the second Trump era. And Elon Musk lost big.
Democratic voters came out in force on Tuesday in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, a sign that the once-latent resistance is raring to go. Musk put in a ton of money — but so did Democrats, amping turnout to midterm-level performance and showing the party’s strength outside of low turnout specials elections. And Democrats now have a legal bulwark to defend their positions on abortion rights and congressional maps in the closely divided state.
By defeating Republican-aligned candidate Brad Schimel, Susan Crawford secured a seat on the state’s highest court — and rejuvenated Democrats nationwide as they cast Musk as the No.1 villain of the second Trump era. Democrats framed the result as an explicit rejection of President Donald Trump, who endorsed Schimel.
Republicans, meanwhile, still haven’t cracked the code for how to turn out Trump voters without the president on the ballot.
“Donald Trump does two things wonderfully: He gets people to turn out to vote for him and he gets liberals to turn out and vote against anyone he supports,” said Rohn W. Bishop, the Republican mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin and former chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP. “The problem is that he can never turn out conservatives to vote for his candidate when he’s not on the ballot.”
The Trump administration and its health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are promising transformative change in health care policy this year, including a major shift in emphasis from infectious diseases to chronic ones. At the same time, health agencies are in unprecedented upheaval and Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency are already examining health spending in a search for savings in HHS’ nearly $2 trillion budget. Lawmakers, federal agency heads, and industry leaders are trying to make sense of it and so will POLITICO at its annual health care summit on April 2, 2025.
A dozen current and former officials confirmed that the encrypted messaging app is used across various agencies — despite warnings about its security vulnerabilities.
Some agencies, including the Department of Defense, have even issued recent warnings about the app’s security vulnerabilities and stressed that Signal is “not approved to process or store nonpublic unclassified information.”
The app has been thrust at the center of a debate on whether top officials should be using Signal to communicate critical and potentially classified information, following the release of a report by The Atlantic last week detailing how members of the president’s Cabinet — including Vice President JD Vance, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — used it to coordinate military strikes in Yemen.
The contents of the group chat — including the specific timing and weapons used in the attacks — were published in full last week by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who was mistakenly added to the conversation by national security adviser Mike Waltz.
Current and former federal workers across agencies, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive government communication methods, revealed a complex and looser use of Signal on government-issued phones in recent months, but didn’t know when the policy shift was sanctioned and by whom. These officials also agree that the free chat app should not be used to discuss sensitive or classified information, which adversaries could intercept.
“For comms like that, you just always assume that there’s somebody on your phone,” said one former CIA official, who called the level of detail relayed in the now infamous group chat “beyond idiotic.”
When it comes to the U.S. policy toward Venezuela, advocates within the Trump administration for a campaign of maximum pressure against the Venezuelan government and President NICOLÁS MADURO are in the driver’s seat — at least for now.
Within Trump’s inner circle, disagreements about how to approach Venezuela remain unresolved. And the volatile U.S.-Venezuela relationship could still provide opportunities for those looking to cut deals with Caracas on migration, and promote greater business opportunities for U.S. energy and mining companies operating in the South American petrostate.
In recent weeks, the U.S. announced it would be cutting off a major economic lifeline to the country by revoking a general license that allowed oil companies, most notably Chevron, to operate in Venezuela. President DONALD TRUMP has also threatened to apply secondary tariffs on countries that purchase Venezuelan oil as a way to further depress the country’s oil sales.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is taking steps to shore up allies in Venezuela’s backyard. On an official visit last week to Guyana, which has been embroiled in a territorial dispute with Venezuela over the status of the resource-rich Essequibo territory, Secretary of State MARCO RUBIO vowed that the U.S. would respond if Venezuela attempted to retake the territory by force.
These steps reflect the early advantage supporters of maximum pressure on Caracas, which include Rubio and special envoy MAURICIO CLAVER-CARONE, have gained in the internal conversation over Venezuela policy, as they pressure Maduro to cede power to a democratically elected government.
The State Department confirmed in a statement to NatSec Daily that “Secretary Rubio is the lead on foreign policy, including our Venezuela policy.” The White House National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment.
But loyal NatSec Daily readers will remember that early on, two other groups were also poised to hold considerable influence over Venezuela policy. The first group, represented by special envoy RICHARD GRENELL and immigration hawks such as deputy chief of staff STEPHEN MILLER and border czar TOM HOMAN, were seen as willing to engage directly with Maduro to ensure Venezuela accepted its nationals that were deported from the United States.
And outside the administration, the oil industry and those connected to companies with extensive operations in the country eyed a total reworking of U.S.-Venezuela relations. This powerful group wanted to keep oil operations going, even if it came at the expense of promoting democracy.
Early on, Grenell seemed to take the lead on shaping U.S. Venezuela policy. The Trump ally went to Caracas at the end of January and met with Maduro, securing the release of six Americans in Venezuelan custody and a commitment from Caracas to retake U.S. deportees. The timing of the Caracas visit, right before Rubio’s first official trip as secretary of State to would-be allies in the Western Hemisphere, rankled State Department officials.
Venezuela took one deportation flight immediately after Grenell’s visit, but efforts to further cooperation on migration hit the skids.
It’s a more extensive use of the app than previously reported and sheds new light on how commonly the Trump administration’s national security team relies on Signal.
National security adviser Mike Waltz’s team regularly set up chats on Signal to coordinate official work on issues including Ukraine, China, Gaza, Middle East policy, Africa and Europe, according to four people who have been personally added to Signal chats.
Two of the people said they were in or have direct knowledge of at least 20 such chats. All four said they saw instances of sensitive information being discussed.
It’s a more extensive use of the app than previously reported and sheds new light on how commonly the Trump administration’s national security team relies on Signal, a publicly available messaging app, to conduct its work.
“It was commonplace to stand up chats on any given national security topic,” said one of the people involved in the chats, adding that the groups often included Cabinet members and high-level staff.
All four of the people were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the private chats.
Veteran national security officials have warned the practice potentially violates regulations on protecting sensitive national security information from foreign adversaries, and federal recordkeeping laws if the chats are automatically deleted.
While foreign automakers and American consumers anticipate climbing car prices, the electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer — led by Musk — may be safe from Trump’s 25 percent tariff because of its domestic production.
“Tesla made a business model choice that has served them well,” said Simon Ellis, who leads supply chain practices at IDC Manufacturing Insights. “They can … argue more compellingly that their cars are really made in America.”
“And in the current climate, that probably helps them,” Ellis added.
Trump’s 25 percent tariff is set to go into effect on April 2 as part of the president’s broader trade war. He argued the tariffs will encourage foreign car manufacturers to move production into the U.S. and increase American jobs.
Tesla produces all of its North American vehicles in the U.S. at factories in California and Texas, potentially lessening the impact for Musk-led company, industry experts said.
“[Tesla] is well positioned because they have vertical integration,” said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, Cox Automotive’s director of industry insights. “They produce the vehicles they are building, the batteries. … They can have more control over that supply chain, which helps them out.”
At least three Senate Republicans are poised to mark President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” escalation of his trade war by formally rebuking a key piece of his tariff strategy. Trump is fighting back.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski revealed Tuesday that she will vote for a resolution from Sen. Tim Kaine that would end the national emergency Trump is using to levy a blanket 25 percent tariff on Canadian imports. She joins Sen. Rand Paul, who co-sponsored Kaine’s resolution, and Sen. Susan Collins, who said she is “very likely” to support it when it comes up for a vote that’s expected Wednesday.
If the trio follows through, Vice President JD Vance will have to be on hand to break a tie to help the Senate GOP block it. Sens. Chuck Grassley — one of many farm-state Republicans concerned about the Canadian tariffs — and John Cornyn were noncommittal Tuesday about how they might vote. The measure is likely DOA in the House in any case.
But Trump isn’t letting it go. In a 12:58 a.m. post, Trump urged Murkowski, Paul, Collins and Sen. Mitch McConnell to “get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change.”
“To the people of the Great States of Kentucky, Alaska, and Maine, please contact these Senators and get them to FINALLY adhere to Republican Values and Ideals,” Trump said.
Wednesday’s tariff announcement will be telling for how the president addresses the world’s second-largest economy.
In his first two months in office, President Donald Trump has already raised tariffs on China twice. The Chinese government has barely flinched.
Wednesday’s much-hyped tariff announcement will be the ultimate test for Trump’s engagement with the world’s second-largest economy — and whether the president can lure the United States’ top economic rival to the bargaining table.
Ever since Trump announced a new 10 percent across-the-board tariff on China in February, the White House has repeatedly hinted that a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping was imminent. But unlike other targets of Trump’s second-term tariff threats, Beijing has thus far largely refused to engage with the administration — even after the White House doubled its China tariffs in March.
“Trump sort of sent the signal, ‘If you come to Washington, make nice and negotiate, maybe you’ll get some breaks.’ And so far Xi Jinping just hasn’t been willing to come over and negotiate,” said Peter Harrell, who led the international economics team on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council.
China’s response stands in contrast to the outpouring of anger and anxiety permeating Trump’s relationships with Canada, Mexico and the European Union. Leaders in each of those longtime U.S. allies have appeared panicked and offended by their treatment by the new American government.
EU officials had hoped to catch Trump’s interest with offers to buy more American gas. Here’s how they hit a wall of bureaucracy and disinterest.
BRUSSELS — Donald Trump had a simple warning for Europe: Buy more American gas or I’ll hit you with crippling tariffs. Great, Europe said. Let’s talk.
Then Trump imposed the tariffs anyway.
In reality, the talks never really even got off the ground. According to four EU officials and diplomats with knowledge of the situation, negotiators were regularly confused and frustrated when they tried to take the U.S. president up on his energy offer, often hitting a wall of bureaucracy and disinterest in Washington.
Now the American leader is set to impose sweeping, across-the-board trade barriers on Wednesday as part of a self-declared “Liberation Day.” It was a moment Europe had hoped to avoid, proactively suggesting all sorts of goodies to placate Trump and avoid an economic maelstrom.
High on the list was buying more American liquefied natural gas (LNG). It was the first thing that Ursula von der Leyen, who runs the EU’s executive arm, suggested following Trump’s election.
The offer seemed logical. Since Russia rolled its tanks into Ukraine in 2022, the EU has bought up more and more U.S. LNG — nearly tripling its imports to help replace Moscow's energy. Monthly consumption even hit a record high last month after Trump entered office.
Europe was doing what Trump said he wanted: buying more American LNG. Officials hoped that could help appease him and escape tariffs. After all, in Trump’s first term, Europe had cooled trade hostilities with pledges to buy more soybeans and LNG.
This time, though, things were different. A more unrestrained Trump is on a crusade to remodel the economic order — for now, that is.
"Liberation Day" has arrived. At 4:00 p.m. ET President Trump is expected to announce his plans for broad-based tariffs.
Why it matters: If these taxes are as high as some reports indicate, the economic fallout could be enormous.
The big picture: Several media outlets and Trump's own comments suggest we could see levies as high as 20% across a wide range of goods. Countries are expected to retaliate.
"Needless to say, it would result in a significant recession," Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's, tells Axios in an email.
The consumer impact could be substantial. The Yale Budget Lab has estimated that a 20% tariff, with retaliation, could reduce the average household's purchasing power by up to $4,200.
Between the lines: Little is actually known about what the president will announce. That uncertainty has crushed sentiment among companies and consumers, which could signal a downturn in spending and growth, though those hard data haven't yet come through.
Some Canadians are ditching their winter homes in the U.S. as tensions between the two countries simmer.
Why it matters: President Trump's tariffs and taunts may be the last straw for snowbirds who are already finding it more expensive to live south of the border, real estate agents say.
What we're hearing: "My Canadian sellers are worried. They feel like they have to take a break from the U.S. for now and see where it goes," Alexandra DuPont, a broker who helps snowbirds buy and sell condos in Florida, tells Axios.
She's working with about 35 Canadian sellers — more than three times the usual for this time of year — and no buyers.
The big picture: America's northern neighbors make up 11% of foreign homebuyers on average over the past decade, according to National Association of Realtors data shared with Axios.
Florida attracts the most Canadian buyers, followed by Arizona and California.
Between the lines: The recent friction with Canada, including Trump's trade drama and talk of annexation, comes as the Canadian dollar weakens against the U.S. dollar.
Chart: Projected change in disposable household income under 20% broad tariffs, by income quintile
Tariff pain is not shared equally: The less money you make, the more President Trump's proposed higher taxes on imports will hurt.
Why it matters: Tariffs are another blow to lower-income earners already struggling with higher prices.
By the numbers: The lowest income households could see their disposable income fall by as much as 5.5%, in a scenario of 20% across-the-board tariffs where other countries retaliate with levies of their own, per an analysis from the Yale Budget Lab.
For the highest-income households, that drop is just 2.1%.
Zoom out: That does not mean middle-class or wealthy Americans are going to escape unscathed.In pure dollar terms, the tariff burden on the highest earners is, well, higher. They make more money and spend more money.
For households in the middle, the big tariffs would cost an average of $3,800 per household, per year. For those in the top tenth, it averages $9,500 per household, per the Yale Budget Lab.
In the long term, the authors write, tariff effects start hitting the wealthy, too, as prices on assets decline.
The new consensus among business owners and economists is that President Trump's colossal trade announcement Wednesday is just the start, not the end, of global economic uncertainty.
Why it matters: Many once hoped the much-hyped reciprocal tariff announcement would settle worldwide economic confusion.
Now the fear is that recent weeks' trade drama — tariff flip-flops and policy hanging in the balance — will stick around for the next four years.
It is a backdrop that makes long-term planning impossible, a separate risk for a teetering economy.
Today's tariff news "will not bring the level of certainty that businesses need to make hiring and investment decisions," Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at accounting firm RSM, wrote on "Liberation Day" eve.
The big picture: Trump, in a Rose Garden event this afternoon, could announce tariffs as high as 20% on almost all imports, the Washington Post reports.
With other tariffs implemented this year, that would bring the effective U.S. tariff rate to almost 33%, the highest since 1872, according to the Budget Lab at Yale.
The previously announced tariffs on foreign-made cars, as well as levies on goods from Canada and Mexico, are also set to take effect.
Economists expect swift retaliation from trading partners.
Between the lines: Manufacturers anticipate they will be left with a slew of questions, including the biggest — how long the reciprocal duties last.
Rep. Vern Buchanan told POLITICO’s Health Care Summit that Republicans will find savings in Medicaid but won’t cut it.
The chair of a key House panel in setting Republicans’ tax and spending agenda said the GOP will seek savings in Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.
But Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.) said that he’d oppose cutting them.
Buchanan, the chair of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee, said that Republicans could do it by rooting out waste.
“I’m not for cuts in Medicaid,” Buchanan said at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit Wednesday. “There are a lot of inefficiencies. We’ve got to find a way to be able to ... do things better for less.”
Buchanan’s comments come as Republicans are trying to figure out how to pay for President Donald Trump’s plan to cut taxes, boost border security and expand energy exploration. House leaders want to find $880 billion in savings to pay for it. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said that would need to come from Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program that more than 75 million low-income Americans rely on.
Tesla's vehicle deliveries plunged 13% in the first quarter, compared with a year earlier, as the company faces a backlash over CEO Elon Musk's political actions.
Why it matters: The datapoint marks one of the first significant indicators that Tesla's brand reputation is suffering from Musk's chainsaw-wielding leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration.
Driving the news: The company delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter, down from 386,810 in the same period a year earlier.
Deliveries are considered a close proxy for sales.
"This delivery number was a disaster for the bulls with continuous negativity around the TSLA brand," Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote today in a research note. "We are not going to look at these numbers with rose colored glasses...they were a disaster on every metric."
Zoom in: The sales drop came despite a ramp up in incentives, such as 0% financing deals.
Private sector hiring was solid in March, at least according to one early indicator that suggests, for now, falling business confidence isn't translating into fewer jobs.
Why it matters: Wall Street economists are worried that the economy will buckle under the weight of Trump's tariffs. That is validated by the sentiment indicators in free fall, but less so in the economic data reflective of what businesses are actually doing.
The first hard indicators of activity for March are out this week.
By the numbers: Private employers added 155,000 jobs in March, rebounding from the upwardly revised 84,000 gain the previous month, according to payroll processor ADP.
What they're saying: "Despite policy uncertainty and downbeat consumers, the bottom line is this: The March topline number was a good one for the economy and employers of all sizes, if not necessarily all sectors," ADP chief economist Nela Richardson said in a statement.
Between the lines: ADP's employment report is not meant to be an indication of what the all-important government payrolls release might show on Friday.
Trump plans to announce a suite of "reciprocal tariffs" after weeks of buildup, dueling press leaks, stock market gyrations and internal jockeying.
The big picture: A central question is whether the new import taxes will apply to a limited list of countries and items seen as having particularly unfair trade policies, or to all (or nearly all) U.S. imports.
The former strategy would limit the scope of the tariffs — and thus their impact on U.S. growth and inflation. It would also imply the presence of off-ramps where trading partners can escape the tariffs through negotiation.
The latter strategy would be simpler to communicate and more consistent with the trade hawks' willingness to risk significant economic pain in hopes of generating long-term revenue for the government and a reindustrialization of the U.S. economy.
Between the lines: This has been the central tension within Trump's trade agenda all along — and now that he is shifting from rhetoric to concrete policy, he's being forced to choose.
Here's the dilemma that automakers face as President Trump's tariffs pile up: They can raise car prices, sacrifice profit margins or redirect R&D spending to expand U.S. manufacturing.
But somebody, somewhere, has to pay the bill for the higher costs that compounding tariffs bring.
Why it matters: The auto industry can't absorb the costs of tariffs and invest in electrification and autonomy and software-defined vehicles and new factories, all while fighting off rising Chinese competitors.
The math just doesn't add up.
Between the lines: If car prices go up, Americans will buy fewer of them, meaning less revenue to fund U.S. growth.
If companies hold steady on pricing, their modest profit margins will vanish, replaced by red ink — another limitation on growth.
It's more than just tariffs causing the auto industry to buckle at this moment.
Carmakers face a litany of issues, including regulatory pressures, technological change, powerful Chinese competition and a stagnant sales market.
Why it matters: For decades, the answer to such challenges has been consolidation. But bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, as recent troubles at Stellantis and Volkswagen Group suggest.
"When an organization grows to a scale of 10 million units, in selling and producing cars, it becomes really troublesome," Toyota Motor Corp. Chairman Akio Toyoda told Automotive News.
"When you're at that scope, nothing can be decided. Mass production is focused on areas of the lowest cost, and the product becomes a commodity," he said.
Reality check: The old playbooks aren't enough anymore to ensure a sustainable, profitable auto industry, says Lenny LaRocca, U.S. auto sector leader for the consulting firm KPMG.
A major discrepancy has already arisen between Senate and House Republicans in the budget resolution they plan to adopt in order to pass President Trump’s domestic agenda.
The 70-page resolution Senate Republicans unveiled Wednesday afternoon would serve as a blueprint, laying out instructions lawmakers will use to write a final bill full of Trump’s top priorities. The House and Senate previously passed competing resolutions and have spent weeks trying to get on the same page.
But Senate Republicans are calling for a $5 trillion increase in the debt limit to be included in the legislation, which they aim to pass without any Democratic support, while House Republicans plan to hike the limit by only $4 trillion.
Senate Republicans say the debt limit needs to be raised by at least $5 trillion to push the issue beyond the 2026 midterm election, warning that otherwise the Republican-controlled Congress might find itself in the tough position of having to raise the debt limit another time right before next year’s election.
But House GOP leaders are leery that a bigger debt-limit increase could spur fiscal conservatives in the lower chamber to vote against the joint budget resolution.
Senate Republicans on Wednesday unveiled a 70-page budget resolution that they say would give Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a staunch ally of President Trump, the power to determine whether extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts officially adds to the federal deficit.
Republicans say the bill empowers Graham to use a “current policy” budget baseline to score an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as not adding to the deficit, neither in the 10-year budget window from 2025 to 2034 nor in the years beyond that window.
That would set the stage for advancing Trump’s legislation agenda around a Democratic filibuster, and would, if it survives a Democratic procedural challenge, enable Republicans to make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent.
Graham in a statement said he has authority under Section 312 of the Congressional Budget Act “to determine baseline numbers for spending and revenue.”
“Under that authority, I have determined that current policy will be the budget baseline regarding taxation. This will allow the tax cuts to be permanent — which will tremendously boost the economy,” he said.
The president’s new tariffs on imported vehicles and his plans to kill a popular tax credit will likely torpedo demand for vehicles made by American workers.
The 25-percent tariffs President Donald Trump has ordered on imported vehicles and parts has sent shock waves through the automobile industry. Manufacturers and dealers are deeply worried about the real chance that sticker prices could climb by as much as $10,000 on vehicles that already cost an average of about $48,000.
Trump has said he isn’t concerned about higher prices. It’s worth it, he says, to promote American manufacturing. But one of the less-discussed consequences of the tariffs is the hit it will put on one of the domestic auto industry’s growing sectors: electric vehicles.
EV sales grew 7 percent last year, according to Cox Automotive, thanks to former President Joe Biden’s policies and a profusion of new models, creating jobs in rural red districts across the South and Midwest.
But Trump is no fan of the migration to EVs, which he has called a “transition to hell.” He has vowed to undo Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act. On top of the import tariffs, Trump has threatened to abolish a tax credit for EV buyers. The double whammy could kill demand for EVs, and jobs along with it.
The tech lobby wants Trump to use tariffs as leverage to kill or weaken foreign rules they say target Silicon Valley.
With American industries broadly stressing out about President Donald Trump’s looming tariff plans, there’s one that sees a possible upside: Big Tech.
For years, Silicon Valley giants have been complaining about foreign regulations on their platforms — taxes, fines and restrictions that the U.S. doesn’t impose, but other large governments do.
Now, tech lobbyists are cautiously hoping President Donald Trump will use his tariff policy as a blunt-force instrument to push it back.
“We need to hold our trading partners accountable if they’re not giving our exporters a fair shake in markets abroad,” said Matthew Schruers, president and CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association. “Tariffs are one tool in the toolbox.” He said tech lobbyists are “encouraged there’s a conversation underway here.”
But they’re also facing the uncertainty of any business counting on Trump’s trade policy: It all depends if he actually sees this as a negotiating tactic, or if he just really likes tariffs.
With the EU, Canada and other allies passing serious tech regulations over the past several years — including privacy rules, antitrust fines and digital taxes — Schruers and other lobbyists have been railing against these policies as unfair to American firms, which are the world’s largest tech players.
President Trumpannounced a baseline 10% tariff on U.S. imports, with steeper reciprocal levies on goods from a slew of other nations, including Europe, Japan and China.
Why it matters: Trump's announcement ends the free-trade era that has defined global commerce for decades — a move that risks higher consumer prices and economic damage.
What they're saying: "This is one of the most important days in my opinion, in American history," Trump said in remarks delivered at a "Liberation Day" event in the Rose Garden.
"We will supercharge our domestic industrial base, we will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers," Trump added.
Stocks, which rose a bit as Trump started speaking, reversed sharply and fell as he unveiled the reciprocal rates.
By the numbers: The reciprocal tariffs hit dozens of nations, including some of the country's largest trading partners.
Imports from the European Union, Japan and South Korea will be subject to tariffs of 20% or higher.
Imports from Vietnam are subject to a tariff rate of 46%, while Taiwanese imports will face 32% tariffs.
Details: The reciprocal tariffs have been tailored based on how unfairly the administration says the countries treat U.S. exporters.
The rates, calculated by Trump's top economists at the Council of Economic Advisors, are meant to hit back at the tariff and non-tariff trade barriers.
Trump said the published rates are half as high as the originally calculated levies.
What to watch: It is President Trump's gamble to revive domestic manufacturing, raise revenues to offset tax cut costs and push other nations to adhere to non-trade related demands.
Canadian Pacific Kansas City (CP.TO), said on Wednesday it and U.S.-based Lanco Group have sold the Panama Canal Railway Company to a unit of Denmark's Maersk (MAERSKb.CO),, one of the world's largest container shipping groups.
The Canadian railway company did not disclose terms of the deal, but added the deal would help it focus on its core assets in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
Founded as a joint venture between units of Canadian Pacific and Lanco Group, the Panama Railway Company provides rail-based freight and passenger services along the canal. It posted a revenue of $77 million last year.
The deal comes at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has threatened to take over the canal - built by the United States and returned to Panama in 1999 - over allegations of growing foreign presence, especially China.
GOP lawmakers rejected a pressure campaign from the Trump administration to adhere to party loyalty on “Liberation Day.”
The Republican-led Senate has delivered a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump and his signature trade agenda.
Senators voted 51-48 Wednesday to reject the national emergency Trump declared earlier this year to justify his plan to slap 25 percent tariffs on Canadian imports. The vote took place hours after Trump delivered remarks from the Rose Garden rolling out his latest plans to slap new tariffs on a wide range of products.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul joined all Democrats in backing a resolution from Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine that would end that national emergency. Another Republican, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, co-sponsored the measure and voted in favor.
The dissent from that handful of Senate Republicans is purely symbolic: Speaker Mike Johnson has already moved to prevent a floor vote in his chamber to end the types of national emergencies upon which Trump is relying to levy his tariffs.
Still, the vote stands as the first major break with Trump since the start of his second term from a Republican-controlled chamber that has otherwise been mostly compliant, from approving controversial cabinet nominees and standing aside as the Department of Government Efficiency slashes through the federal government.
Veterinarians, population researchers, records officers and neuroscientists were all swept up in a chaotic series of layoffs Tuesday that effectively ended the government's health establishment as we know it.
The big picture: The sheer breadth of the cuts and reshuffling may not be apparent for weeks. But in the immediate aftermath, health care industry players and former federal workers say the workforce reductions will almost certainly affect drug approvals, low-income assistance, disease tracking and biomedical research once held up as the gold standard.
"The rapid and substantial changes at [the Food and Drug Administration] this week raise questions about the agency's ability to fulfill its mission to bring new innovative medicines to patients," said Alex Schriver, senior vice president at PhRMA, the drug industry trade group.
Catch up quick: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that layoffs would focus on "paring away excess administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers."
Many administrators and communications professionals — including entire offices — did lose their jobs on Tuesday.
But so did many policy experts, mid-level program directors and scientists.
State of play: Several top scientific leaders, including the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Jeanne Marrazzo, and FDA head tobacco regulator Brian King, were offered reassignments to Indian Health Service roles in remote locations several time zones away, Stat reported.
He also said the election of Trump was a mandate to make dramatic change in leadership.
A top adviser to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday defended the gutting of federal agencies and attacked the medical establishment, which he said is controlled by industry lobbyists in a conspiracy to keep Americans sick.
Calley Means, a fixture in the Make America Healthy Again movement and cofounder of TrueMed, said at POLITICO’s Health Care Summit that the federal health department has been an “utter failure,” pointing to rising rates of chronic disease, lower life expectancy and a culture that is too quick to medicate patients for life without addressing the underlying causes of disease.
“Fundamentally, what Bobby has done is taken over a department that has utterly failed,” Means said.
Means’ comments follow weeks of upheaval at every agency of the health department, which has lost roughly 25 percent of its staff, who oversee everything from pandemic preparedness to oversight of federal health insurance programs.
HHS CUTS FALLOUT — Thousands of federal workers are out of a job after reduction-in-force notices were sent across HHS on Tuesday, sparking frustration and fear across the health care industry.
The firings — which included deep cuts at the CDC, the NIH and the FDA — are part of a massive reorganization announced by HHS Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week that will see the department downsized by 20 percent.
“This is a difficult moment for all of us at HHS. Our hearts go out to those who have lost their jobs. But the reality is clear: what we’ve been doing isn’t working. Despite spending $1.9 trillion in annual costs, Americans are getting sicker every year. In the past four years alone, the agency’s budget has grown by 38% — yet outcomes continue to decline,” Kennedy posted on the social media platform X on Tuesday.
A key adviser’s take: The long-term impact of the cuts will be a focus of discussion when Calley Means, a special government employee to Kennedy, will speak with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns today at our 2025 Health Care Summit.
Means, who co-founded the wellness company TrueMed, is a devotee of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement and a supporter of his efforts to downsize HHS and weed out anyone who might resist reform.
On Tuesday, Means defended and praised the cuts and bashed what he said was media defending “a system that has overseen devastation to American health,” in a post on X.
Who’s out: Among those who lost their jobs Tuesday are senior civil servants, communications staffers and employees responsible for worker safety and HIV prevention programs.
Additionally, the public health world is still reeling from the ousting Friday of Dr. Peter Marks, who led the FDA’s vaccine division for more than eight years. The dismissal is part of a broader overhaul of HHS leadership. Means has celebrated the firing, criticizing Marks’ role in the deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine.
Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and ranking member Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have called on Kennedy to testify on the RIFs before the committee.
“This will be a good opportunity for him to set the record straight and speak to the goals, structure and benefits of the proposed reorganization,” Cassidy said in a statement.
While Cassidy and Sanders await Kennedy’s response, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), a committee member, is scheduled to discuss another of the panel’s concerns — Medicare and Medicaid — with POLITICO’s Erin Schumaker at the summit today.
Also appearing at today’s Health Summit: Dr. Atul Gawande, who led global health programs at the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development in the Biden administration, will address the impacts of shutting down the agency, which managed most of the U.S. global health funding, and cutting most of its programs, with POLITICO’s Carmen Paun.
Senate Democrats are opening an investigation into reports that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is attempting to replace some contract workers at the Education Department with artificial intelligence (AI).
Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), along with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon after a report from The New York Times that call centers that take questions from students and families about student aid could be replaced with an AI bot.
“DOGE’s proposal threatens to misinform borrowers and families, lead to data privacy breaches, and pose conflicts of interest arising from Elon Musk’s financial stake in AI development,” the letter said.
The call centers field around 15,000 questions a day from an average of 1,600 students and families. The proposal has been floated as the president is looking to dismantle the federal agency, laying off nearly half the Department of Education’s employees already.
“The department is open to using tools and systems that would enhance the customer service, security and transparency of data for students and parents,” Madi Biedermann, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, told The Times back in Feb. “We are evaluating all contracts to assess effectiveness relative to costs.”
Rep. Diana DeGette told POLITICO’s Health Care Summit that there’s not enough waste in Medicaid to find the savings the GOP is promising.
President Donald Trump has tasked Republicans with figuring out how to pay for his agenda, which includes increased border security and an expansion of energy resources while cutting taxes. House leaders have said they can find $880 billion in savings to cover the bill.
Now, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on which DeGette serves is trying to figure out where the cuts will come from if they can’t find enough savings by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Democrats cite data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in arguing lawmakers will have to cut Medicaid, the publicly funded health insurance program that covers more than 75 million low-income Americans.
Earlier, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R- Fla.) told the audience at the summit that he’s not in favor of cuts to Medicaid, but that there might be ways to find the money without reducing benefits.
“There are a lot of inefficiencies. We’ve got to find a way to be able to ... do things better for less,” he said.
DeGette doesn’t agree. The ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee’s Health Subcommittee, said she’s looked at other potential other areas they could cut to make up the $880 billion needed to fund Trump’s agenda.
“We realized all the rest of the spending in the Energy and Commerce Committee, all the rest of it is $500 billion. So if you zeroed out everything else that we do, you’d still be $330 billion short,” she said.
The Supreme Court unanimously overturned a lower court ruling Wednesday and found the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acted lawfully when it blocked two vaping companies from marketing fruity and dessert-flavored liquids for their electronic nicotine products.
The justices rejected an earlier ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that the FDA violated the Administrative Procedures Act and unfairly changed its standards while reviewing the companies’ applications. The justices remanded the case back to the lower court to reconsider.
The opinion, written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, indicated the agency acted properly, and had been clear from the outset that it was making decisions based on whether the products appealed to young people.
“Affected parties may have come away with the impression that the agency would apply a less demanding standard of proof than is evident in the denial orders the FDA ultimately issued,” Alito wrote.
But “in the end, we cannot say that the FDA improperly changed its position with respect to scientific evidence” and other guidelines, Alito added.
The FDA has authorized the sale of only 34 electronic cigarette products, and all except one have been tobacco flavored, which is not widely used by young people.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has fired all of the workers in its program that seeks to help low-income Americans pay their energy bills.
Everyone who had been working on the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) was let go on Tuesday, according to now-former employee Andrew Germain.
“Every single federal staff member that worked on LIHEAP was let go, so there are no federal staff members left to work on the program,” Germain told The Hill.
He said that prior to both probationary cuts and the latest round of firings, there had been about 15 people working on LIHEAP.
The program doles out funds to states, which in turn use the money to help people pay to heat and cool their homes and prevent utilities from shutting off the air or heat.
According to Germain, all of the staff who worked on Social Services Block Grants, which help states and territories pay for social services that protect people, including children, from neglect and abuse, were also let go.
The intervention by a senior FDA official in a product decision is a highly unusual action.
A top FDA official directly intervened in an agency review of Novavax’s Covid-19 vaccine, pausing the approval process to ask for more data on the shot, according to four people familiar with the decision granted anonymity to discuss the approval status.
Dr. Sara Brenner, FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner, took the highly unusual step, cutting against longstanding precedent at the agency designed to shield scientific assessments from political interference. Typically, political FDA appointees follow the advice of career staff tasked with reviewing reams of data on drugs and vaccines seeking approval.
The move comes amid HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to force out the top official responsible for reviewing such vaccines, Dr. Peter Marks, and put his deputy Julie Tierney on administrative leave.
An HHS official granted anonymity to discuss the FDA’s review of the shot noted that Dr. Scott Steele was named acting director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research on Tuesday. That office is tasked with reviewing vaccine applications.
The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency’s press office was among the thousands of job cuts Tuesday.
A bipartisan trio in the Senate unveiled a proposal Wednesday to require schools to offer nondairy milk options at lunch to accommodate students who are lactose intolerant or have other dietary restrictions.
The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) has long required school lunches to include milk on all trays in order for schools to be reimbursed for the meals.
But the Freedom in School Cafeterias and Lunches (FISCAL) Act — introduced by Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) — would update the legislation to require schools to also offer students “plant-based milk” that is “consistent with nutritional standards established by the Secretary.”
“We need to be doing whatever it takes to make sure our kids are fed in school,” Fetterman said in a statement. “This bipartisan bill cuts the unnecessary red tape in our nutrition assistance programs so students can access meals that work for them and their dietary needs.”
Booker said the bill also seeks to remedy inequity in the school lunch program, noting many people of color are lactose intolerant and are deprived of some nutrition that other students might get through milk at lunch.
Democratic officials from 23 states and the District of Columbia will get a Thursday hearing in a case suing to stop the Trump administration from canceling more than $11 billion in public health funding.
The states sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Tuesday, asking for a preliminary injunction and temporary restraining order to stop the cuts from taking effect. The officials claimed the administration acted unlawfully, without any analysis of benefits of the health funding or the dire consequences of termination.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. Thursday’s hearing will be in front of Judge Mary McElroy, who was appointed by President Trump in 2019.
HHS said the funds, totaling $11.4 billion, were primarily used for COVID-19 response including testing, vaccination and hiring community health workers. Since the pandemic has ended, HHS said the funds would be rescinded.
The administration also canceled about $1 billion in grants awarded by coronavirus relief legislation and allocated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the department said last week in a statement.
As an anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent years attacking Anthony Fauci and sowing doubts about the successful effort he led to develop a Covid vaccine.
As HHS secretary, he’s exacting his revenge.
Kennedy on Tuesday fired Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and reassigned at least three of Fauci’s longtime colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, as part of a purge of senior officials involved in the government’s development and distribution of the Covid vaccine, eight people familiar with the matter said.
Fauci, the longtime head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was the face of the government’s response to the Covid pandemic during President Donald Trump’s first term. But the relationship between the two soured as the virus spread, and Republicans have since sought to villainize Fauci’s actions.
The removals, which came amid a mass reduction in force across the health department, effectively gutted leadership at the NIH’s infectious disease office and key parts of the Food and Drug Administration, stunning agency employees and leaving the broader public health community in disbelief.
“It’s like a Fauci fixation,” said Dr. Eric Topol, a public health expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “So many of these people are just dedicated, they really want to do good and now they’re losing their jobs senselessly.”
POLITICO spoke to 11 people for this story, many of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retribution.
The case hinges on whether Medicaid patients have the right to see the doctor of their choice.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared sympathetic Wednesday to South Carolina’s bid, backed by the Trump administration, to exclude Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program and deny affected patients the ability to challenge that exclusion in court.
But while Planned Parenthood’s provision of abortion services outside of Medicaid is what led South Carolina to blacklist the group, abortion was rarely mentioned over nearly two hours of arguments.
Instead, the justices spent most of Wednesday debating whether Congress should have to use “magic words” like “right” or “entitlement” when writing a law to guarantee an individual’s ability to enforce it in court. Planned Parenthood teamed up with an individual Medicaid recipient to sue the state under a provision in federal law that says Medicaid recipients can choose any “qualified and willing” provider.
Most of the court’s conservatives seemed opposed to reading the law to allow such suits. Justice Brett Kavanaugh went the furthest, saying he was “not allergic to” endorsing a “magic words” test that would limit patient suits to instances where Congress used explicit language creating such a right.
If the high court opts for that sort of ruling, it would likely cause a stampede of other conservative states cutting reproductive and sexual health clinics out of their Medicaid programs — shrinking the network of providers available to low-income patients.
Intra-party concerns over optics and messaging are threatening support for a Senate Democrat's resolution to overturn President Trump's tariffs on Canada, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The resolution, offered by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), is a rare shot for Democrats to peel off GOP votes and deal a major political blow to Trump's tariff policies.
It would overturn Trump's emergency declaration allowing him to place tariffs on Canada. The White House has cited fentanyl flowing across the border as a reason for the declaration.
Some Senate Democrats this week have raised concerns that voting for the resolution would make it look like they are against stopping fentanyl coming in from Canada, multiple sources told Axios.
Kaine told Axios on Wednesday that he thinks "we're gonna be okay on our side" but the party was working through some internal concerns over the resolution.
The big picture: If Democrats can stick together, they stand a good shot of passing the measure through the Senate on Wednesday evening.
The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
The step, reported by The Associated Press, is the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate DEI policies, programs, social media postings and curriculum in federal agencies and schools.
The Academy did not immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment.
Officials for the Annapolis, Md., school were instructed to review the library late last week, though it is unclear if the directive came straight from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth arrived for a visit Tuesday, though officials said the visit was unconnected to the purge, according to the AP.
Around 900 books were initially identified in the sweep before nearly 400 were removed. A list of the books has not yet been made available.
Senators from both sides of the aisle are reigniting efforts to crawl back technology companies’ legal immunities with hopes bipartisan support in Congress could push the bill across the finish line this session and gain the backing of President Trump.
Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are expected to soon introduce a bill to sunset Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in what would be one of the first bipartisan pushes in years to sunset the long-contested liability shield.
Pressure is ramping up on lawmakers, who failed to pass most related legislation last session despite major lobbying efforts from tech safety groups and families hoping to hold technology companies accountable for social media harms, specifically on young children.
“The damage being done every year just gets worse,” Graham told The Hill. “There’s more support from the public [this session], the parents and grandparents feel helpless.”
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, often dubbed as the 26 words that created the internet, largely protects technology companies from being held legally responsible for third party or user consent.
Democrats are stepping up their opposition to one of President Trump’s latest executive orders, which would require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
The order directs state and local officials to record on voter registration forms “the type of document that the applicant presented as documentary proof of United States citizenship,” such as a passport, Real ID, or another state or federal issue identification that proves citizenship, among other aspects.
Critics say the order will only result in large swaths of voters being disenfranchised, and multiple groups, including the Democratic National Committee, have filed lawsuits over the executive order to block it from moving forward.
“There are multiple problems with it,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told The Hill.
“The president [of] United States does not control voting laws. The states control voting laws in America, and Congress can regulate, but Congress has not passed anything the president’s talking about,” added Raskin, who’s also a constitutional law professor,.
In a post to Truth Social early Wednesday, Trump willed the senators to “hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.”
The message — targeted at McConnell, as well as GOP Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Rand Paul (Ky.) — argued that those who do not stand up to the resolution “are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels.”
His request comes after Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) forged a resolution earlier this week that would terminate the president’s declaration to slap tariffs on Canada, one of the U.S.’s largest trading partners. The vote is expected on Wednesday.
President Trump has an unlikely foe in his efforts to target Big Law firms: Paul Clement.
Clement is a conservative legal heavyweight who served as solicitor general in President George W. Bush’s administration and has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court. He has notched major conservative victories at the court, including expanding the Second Amendment, ending deference to federal agencies and enabling a high school football coach to pray on the field with students.
Now, Clement is taking on WilmerHale as a client as it sues the president over his executive order restricting the firm’s attorneys’ security clearances and access to federal buildings.
“The Order is not only a threat to WilmerHale, but inimical to our Nation’s constitutional order and the rule of law,” Clement wrote in court filings.
It’s an interesting position for Clement, who twice resigned from Big Law firms to keep representing conservative positions.
Democrats clinched a landslide victory in Wisconsin and made inroads in two deep-red Florida districts, spelling trouble for Republicans.
The tech billionaire became a huge focus of a state Supreme Court race. It turned out to help Democrats a lot.
Republicans emerged from Tuesday’s elections on shaky footing.
Over the past 10 weeks, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have worked to hobble the federal government, pummel into submission the country’s most powerful independent institutions and enact a sweeping nationalist agenda with little regard — and often disdain — for political norms and the Constitution itself. And they’ve done so with near-universal support from the GOP in Washington.
Then the voters got the chance to speak.
In two deep-red House districts in Florida, Republicans had lower-than-expected margins as they clinched the safe seats vacated by “America First” royalty only after sending in national and state reinforcements, including Trump himself, to drum up support. And in Wisconsin, they suffered a crushing defeat in a record-breakingly expensive Supreme Court race. After Musk’s money and personality dominated the contest, liberal Judge Susan Crawford secured a 9-point victory against Trump’s endorsed candidate, Brad Schimel.
“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag,” said Pam Van Handel, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County. “I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”
Republicans lost a Wisconsin state Supreme Court race Tuesday evening, a warning sign for President Trump and the MAGA agenda ahead of 2026.
Why it matters: The GOP also survived a late scare in a Florida special election. But losing in Wisconsin — letting Democrats keep their 4-3 court majority — has major ramifications for voting and abortion rights, along with future House redistricting.
Republicans kept the House seat in Florida formerly held by national security adviser Mike Waltz, with Randy Fine holding off Democrat Josh Weil.
Republicans also held the Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Matt Gaetz before he resigned from Congress in November. Jimmy Patronis defeated Democratic candidate Gay Valimont.
1. 2026 looks scary for MAGA without Trump on the ballot.
Republican House candidates in Florida fell far short of Trump's performance in November. The margins of victory for Patronis and Fine were about half of the margins for Waltz and Gaetz.
The White House is so frustrated by the lack of clear and fast communications by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s agency that it has set up a parallel press shop, five top Trump administration sources tell Axios.
Driving the news: The problem surfaced in February, after it took two days for the Health and Human Services Department to acknowledge — by tweet — that a West Texas child had become the first person to die in the measles outbreak.
White House officials blamed Stefanie Spear, a Kennedy adviser for more than a decadewho RFK Jr. has empowered as his deputy chief of staff and gatekeeper.
"The White House was like, 'Where the f**k is the statement?' " said a White House official who was involved in the measles response. "CNN was blaring this chyron about how Kennedy was silent, and there was just nothing from the department because of Stefanie."
On Feb. 26 — the day the Texas child died — Kennedy, long known as a vaccine skeptic, had minimized the measles outbreak during a Cabinet meeting.
Since the measles debacle, the White House communications team has handled more press relations on behalf of HHS than any other department, and often has acted as a contact between reporters and the agency.
The White House is seriously considering an Iranian proposal for indirect nuclear talks, while at the same time significantly boosting U.S. forces in the Middle East in case President Trump opts for military strikes, two U.S. officials tell Axios.
Why it matters: Trump has repeatedly said he'd prefer a deal, but warned that without one "there will be bombing." His timeline is tight: Trump gave Iran a two-month deadline to reach a deal, but it's not clear if and when that clock started ticking.
The White House is still engaged in an internal debate between those who think a deal is achievable and those who see talks as a waste of time and back strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
In the meantime, the Pentagon is engaged in a massive buildup of forces in the Middle East. If Trump decides the time is up, he will have a loaded gun at the ready.
Behind the scenes: Over the weekend, Trump received Iran's formal response to the letter he sent Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei three weeks ago, a U.S. official said.
While Trump proposed direct nuclear negotiations, the Iranians would agree only to indirect talks mediated by Oman.
Tariffs are meant to boost U.S. manufacturing and jobs, but the issue is complicated.
Why it matters: In the short run, U.S. manufacturers are going to hurt from these tariffs, and whether they lead to more jobs in the long term is an open question.
Zoom in: U.S. manufacturers may produce their products here, but they also import a lot of things to make their goods.
That includes motor vehicle parts, electrical and electronic components, and nonferrous metals (excluding aluminum). A significant share come from Mexico, Canada and China, as a paper from Deloitte out Wednesday notes.
Between the lines: If Trump's tariffs are broad-based, those "intermediate input" costs will rise. Manufacturers are already worried about this and have been in a bit of a holding pattern.
The Institute for Supply Management said yesterday the manufacturing sector fell into contraction in March, as its index of activity dropped to 49 from 50.3 (50 is the line between expansion and contraction).
President Trump's social media company on Wednesday filed papers with securities regulators that would allow Trump's trust to sell almost 115 million shares of the company's stock.
Why it matters: Truth Social may be hoping for a halo from Newsmax, the conservative media company that went public Monday and saw its stock rise from $10 to $233 in two days.
Driving the news: Trump Media & Technology Group, which operates Truth Social, filed a registration statement with the SEC allowing a variety of shareholders to sell stock from time to time.
Included are 114,750,000 shares held by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, the entirety of the trust's holding. (Registering the shares for sale does not guarantee if or when they will be sold, however.)
Donald Trump Jr. oversees the trust, per the filing.
By the numbers: Shares in Truth Social fell almost 8% in premarket trading on the news.
Joe Rogan, the podcaster MAGAworld can't ignore, warned his listeners about "people who are not criminals ... getting lassoed up and deported and sent to El Salvador prisons."
Why it matters: As the Trump administration "has rushed to carry out deportations as quickly as possible, making mistakes and raising concerns about due process along the way, the [right's] unified front in favor of President Trump's immigration purge is beginning to crack," the New York Times notes.
Case in point: A Salvadorian national living in Maryland legally was wrongly deported to El Salvador, the Department of Justice has admitted in court papers, Axios' Russell Contreras reports.
The erroneous deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was first reported by The Atlantic. He hasn't been convicted of gang-related crimes.
Vice President Vance tweeted that a court document shows Abrego Garcia is "a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here."
Reality check: Garcia has not been convicted of gang-related crimes. A confidential informant told ICE that he was, according to a court filing.
The department wanted to drop the charges while retaining the right to refile them someday — an arrangement that could have given Trump powerful leverage over Adams.
A federal judge permanently dismissed the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, clinching a remarkable turn of fortune for the embattled Democrat who was indicted on corruption charges six months ago but was let off the hook when President Donald Trump’s Justice Department decided to stop prosecuting him.
The department wanted to drop the charges while retaining the right to refile them someday — an arrangement that could have given the Trump administration powerful leverage over Adams. But U.S. District Judge Dale Ho rejected that proposal and ordered the charges dismissed forever.
In a 78-page decision, Ho wrote that allowing the Justice Department to reserve the right to refile charges “would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents.”
A federal judge in Northern California ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore legal funding for migrant children in immigration court.
Nonprofits representing unaccompanied minors challenged the administration in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after the government notified them on March 21 that their contract would be terminated. The program provides legal representation to about 26,000 children, some of whom are too young to read or even speak.
The groups held the government is legally obligated to provide representation to vulnerable children under a 2008 anti-trafficking law.
The government argued that funding was discretionary and the matter of a contract dispute.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín of San Francisco granted the nonprofits, including Los Angeles-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, a restraining order Tuesday night.
“Terminating funding for direct legal representation for unaccompanied children, without any plan to ensure continuity in representation, potentially violates Congress’ express directive in the TVRPA,” she said referencing the anti-trafficking law.
The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 provides special protections to children vulnerable to exploitation. It requires the government “shall ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” all unaccompanied children receive legal counsel to represent them in “legal proceedings.”
FIRST IN POLITICO: HEADED SOUTH — President Donald Trump has named bomb-hurling Republican Assemblymember Bill Essayli the new U.S. Attorney in California’s central district, Blake scooped. Essayli resigned from the Legislature late Tuesday and officially starts his new role, based out of Los Angeles, today.
THE BUZZ: ANOTHER ONE — Xavier Becerra, the former health secretary under President Joe Biden, is joining the burgeoning field to be California’s next governor — regardless of whether Kamala Harris seeks the post.
The former California attorney general, who has been mulling a run for the state’s top job for at least a year, launched his bid in a brief video on Wednesday shared first to Playbook.
“I watched my parents — a construction worker and a clerical worker — achieve the California dream,” Becerra said in a bare-bones, direct-to-camera clip. “Can we do that today, with this affordability crisis? Very tough. But we’ve taken on these tough fights … We can do that, but you need a leader who can be tough.”
Becerra’s entrance into the race injects new intrigue into a contest that for months had been stagnant as Democrats and their deep-pocketed funders wait to see if the former vice president will jump into the fray. But recently the campaign has seen stirrings; former Rep. Katie Porterlaunched her own bid last month and other contenders have taken increasingly pointed swipes at Harris and her drawn-out decision timeline.
Becerra’s campaign insists he would not drop out of the race even if Harris, the Democrats’ nominee for president in 2024, declares her candidacy for governor.
In his own bid, Becerra, 67, is not overtly carrying the progressive banner or pitching himself as a centrist Democrat. Instead, he seeks to make the race a referendum on experience, hoping to convince voters he has the most credibility to manage the gigantic state and take on President Donald Trump, whom he sued more than 120 times when he was California attorney general during the president’s first term.
In a happenstance twist of timing, his campaign launch dovetailed with the Trump administration’s mass firings at the Health and Human Services Department that Becerra once ran. He had been hitting the airwaves in recent days to blast the department’s gutting as a “manmade disaster.”
Becerra plans on making his stewardship of HHS, which under his leadership employed more than 85,000 people, a centerpiece of his campaign. But his tenure there was uneven. He took the brunt of criticism over the administration’s poor handling of sheltering an influx of migrant children and was criticized for having little sway in setting policy around Covid.
He found stronger footing when it came to shoring up the Affordable Care Act and forcefully supporting abortion rights. Still, POLITICO reported last year there was little expectation among Democrats that Biden would have kept him in the job if he had won a second term, or that Becerra would have wanted to stay.
Before joining the Biden administration, Becerra served more than 30 years as a California public official — first in the state legislature and then as a longtime House member representing the neighborhoods around downtown Los Angeles. He ascended the leadership ranks, serving on the powerful Ways and Means committee and as Democratic Caucus Chair, and was a central figure during the Obama era in negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform, an effort that ultimately failed.
He was appointed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to serve as state attorney general in 2017, replacing Harris after she was elected to the Senate. The top law enforcement job gave Becerra the platform to be the face — albeit a mild-mannered one — of California’s litigation-heavy resistance during Trump’s first term.
The Musk-backed Brad Schimel got thumped Tuesday night.
Republicans lost decisively in Tuesday night’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Elon Musk is still saying everything is going according to plan.
Musk catapulted the state Supreme Court election into national view, vocally backing conservative candidate Brad Schimel — who also clinched President Donald Trump’s endorsement — and pouring millions into the efforts to get him elected. The Wisconsin election, Musk claimed, would decide the trajectory of not only the whole country, but perhaps all of “Western civilization” and “the future of the world,” as he said in a Spaces conversation on X hours before polls closed Tuesday.
But despite Musk’s effort to land Schimel a win, Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford overwhelmingly won Tuesday night’s election, securing the court’s liberal majority.
After warning of the dire stakes for the election, Musk changed his tune in the hours following the crushing defeat, seemingly indicating that the loss was all part of a bigger plan.
“I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain,” Musk replied to an X user early Wednesday morning.
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal is calling Tuesday night’s election results in Wisconsin in Florida a wake-up call for President Trump and Republicans.
“Democrats solidified their 4-3 progressive majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday, and the ramifications are nationwide,” the Journal’s editorial board wrote late Tuesday, calling liberal Judge Susan Crawford’s win “the second sign in two weeks of a political backlash against the Trump Presidency.”
“That’s a warning to the GOP that the Trump-Musk governing style is stirring a backlash that could cost them control of Congress next year,” the Journal said.
Republicans held on to two House seats in Florida on Tuesday, though the Journal said even there margins were thinner than expected, writing, “we hope the results don’t scare House Republicans into backing away from their tax and regulatory reform agenda.”
“But the elections are a warning to Mr. Trump to focus on what got him re-elected — especially prices and growth in real incomes after inflation,” the newspaper continued. “His willy-nilly tariff agenda undermining stock prices and consumer and business confidence isn’t helping.”
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen will visit Greenland this week after the Trump administration ramps up its rhetoric about a takeover of the semiautonomous Danish territory.
Frederiksen will meet with the territory’s new leader, Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen.
“It is important for me to visit and greet the future Chairman of the Government of Greenland as soon as possible. It has my deepest respect how the Greenlandic people and the Greenlandic politicians handle the great pressure that is on Greenland,” Frederiksen said in a weekend statement announcing her travel, Wednesday through Friday.
“It is a situation that calls for unity across political parties. Across the countries in the Danish Realm. And on cooperation in a respectful and equal way,” she added.
Frederiksen also is slated to meet with the Naalakkersuisut, Greenland’s chief executive body, amid President Trump’s vocal desires to annex Greenland, which is rich in raw minerals and natural resources, for U.S. security purposes.
The president is pleased with Musk but the decision comes as the tech mogul increasingly looks like a political liability.
President Donald Trump has told his inner circle, including members of his Cabinet, that Elon Musk will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner, ubiquitous cheerleader and Washington hatchet man.
The president remains pleased with Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency initiative, according to three Trump insiders who were granted anonymity to describe the evolving relationship, but both men have decided in recent days that it will soon be time for Musk to return to his businesses and take on a supporting role.
Musk’s looming retreat comes as some Trump administration insiders and many outside allies have become frustrated with his unpredictability and increasingly view the billionaire as a political liability, a dynamic that was thrown into stark relief Tuesday when a conservative judge Musk vocally supported lost his bid for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat by 10 points.
It also represents a stark shift in the Trump-Musk relationship from a month ago, when White House officials and allies were predicting Musk was “here to stay” and that Trump would find a way to blow past the 130-day time limit.
One senior administration official said Musk is likely to retain an informal role as an adviser and continue to be an occasional face around the White House grounds. Another cautioned that anyone who thinks Musk is going to disappear entirely from Trump’s orbit is “fooling themselves.”
Macron opened a weekly meeting of French ministers by addressing the court’s decision, recalling “three things” government spokesperson Sophie Primas said: “that the judiciary is independent;” “that the threats made against judges are absolutely unbearable and intolerable;” and that “the law is the same for everyone.”
Macron also stated that “all defendants have the right to legal recourse,” Primas said.
A three-judge panel on Monday found Le Pen guilty of embezzling funds from the European Parliament and sentenced her to four years in prison — two of which are suspended and the other two to be served under house arrest — fined her €100,000 and immediately barred her from standing for public office for the next five years.
Former Costa Rican President and Nobel laureate Óscar Arias Sánchez said Tuesday that the United States had revoked his visa to enter the country.
The big picture: Arias, a Trump critic who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for a peace plan to end civil wars in Central America, joins a list of dozens of foreign nationals who have had their visas suspended as the administration targets those it deems have "hostile attitudes" toward the U.S.
In recent Facebook posts, Arias criticized Trump for throwing "threats" to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a contentious White House meeting and compared him to a "Roman emperor, telling the rest of the world what to do."
Driving the news: Arias, who was president between 1986 and 1990 and again between 2006 and 2010, said in a news conference Tuesday he received a brief email from the U.S. government alerting him his visa had been revoked.
Democrats slammed Education Secretary Linda McMahon for dodging their questions about the end of her department in a Wednesday meeting, accusing the secretary of not having a plan for moving forward after firing half of her employees.
Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.), one 10 Democratic lawmakers who met with McMahon at the Education Department, said there was “a lot of unsatisfactory, sort of, ambiguity” about her promises to follow statute while also making her goal to “end the department de facto by cutting and slashing the workforce so the department absolutely does not fulfill its functions.”
Takano and McMahon confirmed during a press conference afterwards that more meetings between the secretary and Democrats would take place in the future.
The press conference struck an odd balance between criticisms and cordial attitudes from the Democrats, who said no other Cabinet chief has yet been willing to meet with them face-to-face.
“I have to say the secretary indicated more than once that before she moved any functions of the department […] that she was looking carefully at what the statute allows her to do. That was refreshing information that the secretary conveyed to all of us,” Takano said.
“For a generally lawless, extraconstitutional, extralegal administration […] the words from this secretary were much different than I expected,” he added.
FTC Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya were dismissed from their roles in March, with the administration telling the former commissioners their continued service at the FTC was “inconsistent” with its policies.
The pair sued the administration last week, arguing their firings were unlawful under a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent that bars the president from removing leaders of independent agencies without cause.
Ferguson stood by the administration’s decision during an appearance at Y Combinator’s Little Tech Competition Summit on Wednesday.
“I’m firmly of the view that he had the authority, and that independent agencies [are] not good for a democracy,” Ferguson said.
“All powerful executive branch officials should be accountable to the people on whose behalf we are governing, and the only person in the executive branch that gets elected is the president,” he continued.
The governor called Fine a “squish” and blamed policies he supported for an underperformance in the special election.
Appearing at a press conference in Ocala, Florida, the day after the election, DeSantis argued that President Donald Trump’s involvement in the 6th District race pushed Fine over the line. He added voters had not wanted to support Fine, who Trump had endorsed, and that the president “really had to bail him out in the end.”
“These are voters who didn’t like Randy Fine,” DeSantis said, “but who basically are like, ‘You know what? We’re going to take one for the team. The president needs another vote up there, and so we’re going to do it.’”
National Republicans had been nervous about the race between Fine and progressive Josh Weil, who raised nearly $14 million and was polling close in the election’s closing weeks. Trump mobilized GOP support and held a telephone town hall urging people to vote for him, in addition to several top MAGA surrogates hosting Fine for interviews.
The former Senate Republican leader will likely deliver the deciding vote on a resolution to block a national emergency used to justify the new tariffs on Canadian imports.
Sen. Mitch McConnell privately indicated to Sen. Tim Kaine he would back the Virginia Democrat’s resolution to undo President Donald Trump’s Canada tariffs.
Kaine told reporters Wednesday that the former GOP leader told him the day before that he would back Kaine’s resolution, which will get a vote on the Senate floor Wednesday evening. A spokesperson confirmed Kaine’s remarks.
McConnell’s support is not necessarily a surprise: He’s been vocal in his warnings about Trump’s tariffs, including in a recent op-ed in The Courier-Journal. But it’s the latest instance of McConnell bucking the administration since leaving his leadership position, and McConnell’s support means Kaine’s resolution will likely have the votes it needs to advance in the Senate.
Democrats keep overperforming in down-ballot elections, and the Wisconsin results suggest it’s not just about turnout.
A POLITICO analysis of Tuesday’s preliminary results suggests Democrats maintained a turnout advantage even in the high-profile race, with Elon Musk’s millions not enough to compel Republicans to the polls in as great numbers in a spring election. But troublingly for the GOP, voting levels were actually relatively close to a midterm, suggesting a favorable electorate for Democrats heading into 2026.
Unlike the special elections where Democrats have already posted major upsets this year, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race was not a low-turnout affair. In two Florida special elections also held on Tuesday, where Democrats overperformed the presidential results by roughly 16 and 22 points but still lost deep-red seats, turnout was well under half of November 2024 levels.
But in Wisconsin — where Crawford ran roughly 10 points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance in the state — nearly 70 percent as many ballots were cast in Tuesday’s election as in November. Turnout in Tuesday’s election was closer to the 2022 midterm than the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which similarly took place in April and resulted in a 10-point win by the liberal candidate.
House deficit hawks’ message to Senate on its budget: ‘Go back to the drawing board’
They’re objecting to the size of tax cuts in the Senate’s budget plan and its plan to zero out the costs.
Deficit hawks in the House are already pushing back hard on Senate Republicans’ blueprint to advance President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda — particularly the portion of the plan that would spend far more on tax cuts.
“The Senate needs to go back to the drawing board and really do the hard work that is required to achieve the consensus similar to ... the process we went through in the House,” said Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), the second highest-ranking member of the House Budget Committee, in an interview Wednesday morning.
Ways and Means Committee member and deficit hawk David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) indicated he also has problems with the Senate plan as he headed into a committee meeting Wednesday at the Library of Congress to continue hashing out provisions for the GOP tax bill.
“I still don’t think we’re being aggressive enough” on reducing the deficit,Schweikert said.
Smucker also said he has “a lot of concerns” with Senate Republicans’ plans to zero out the costs of extending trillions of dollars in expiring tax cuts, while allowing for up to $1.5 trillion in additional tax polices. The House budget blueprint takes account of the cost of those extensions.
A second wave of buyout offers has gone out to federal workers inside some agencies, including Transportation, GSA and the Housing department, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The context for these offers, sent to at least five agencies, has shifted radically since the initial "Fork in the Road" email went out in February — employees have been through the fire over the past month, laid off, forced out or embroiled in court fights to keep their jobs.
Folks are more receptive this time around, per the Washington Post, which first reported on the new buyouts.
Thousands of new workers are eligible, the paper reports. It says employees at the Energy Department and USDA also received offers.
Deadlines to decide range between April 7 and April 15.
Zoom in: Distinct from round 1, an Office of Personnel Management official said these offers are being initiated at the agency level.
UFC signed a multimillion-dollar partnership deal Tuesday with Meta, Facebook’s parent company, with the goal of restructuring its fan experience to include artificial intelligence (AI).
UFC will use a wide range of its platforms including Meta AI, Meta Glasses, Meta Quest, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads to connect with patrons online and at in-person events.
“Meta has the greatest minds in tech and they are going to take fan engagement to the next level. We’ve already started to work on some innovations with Meta around a new fighter rankings system that I’ll be sharing soon,” UFC President and CEO Dana White said in a release.
“The next few years will be an absolute game changer for fans of this sport,” he added.
White joined Meta’s board of directors in January where he will help oversee the company’s internal growth. The UFC executive’s new role marks the first time he’s joined an outside board, underscoring the budding friendship with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook founder lauded his formal collaboration with the aggrandized fighting league.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) plugged FBI Director Kash Patel’s book on the “deep state” at the end of his remarks reacting to the corruption case against him officially being dropped.
Adams said in his remarks on Wednesday that the case against him should never have been brought and maintained that he didn’t do anything wrong. He said New Yorkers stop him “all the time” trying to find the rationale for why charges were brought, and he found the rationale in Patel’s book, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for our Democracy.”
“I’m going to encourage every New Yorker to read it,” he said. “Read it and understand how we can never allow this to happen to another innocent American.”
Most say arrests of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally should be allowed at protests or in homes, but not at places of worship or schools
Roughly one-third of U.S. adults (32%) say all immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported, while 16% say none should be deported. About half (51%) say at least some should face deportation.
U.S. adults who say some immigrants living in the country illegally should be deported have varying views of who should be removed. Nearly all (97%) support deporting those who have committed violent crimes.
Those who favor some deportations are more evenly divided when it comes to deporting those who have committed nonviolent crimes (52%) or have arrived in the U.S. during the past four years (44%). By contrast, far fewer say those with family ties in the U.S. should be deported, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted Feb. 24 to March 2, 2025.
Most voters in a new poll predicted President Trump will attempt to serve a third term in the White House, despite a constitutional restriction limiting presidents to two terms.
A survey from YouGov found 56 percent of U.S. adults thought Trump “probably” or “definitely” would try to serve again, compared to 28 percent who said the opposite and 15 percent who said they weren’t sure.
The results come after Trump over the weekend said he’s “not joking” about potentially serving a third term. Pressed about it in a call with NBC News, Trump said “there are methods which you could do it, as you know.”
WASHINGTON (WCBD) — Federal prosecutors moved Tuesday to dismiss charges against a man who Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) accused of assaulting her during an event at the Capitol last year.
Mace accused James McIntyre of Illinois, a national foster care advocate, of accosting her during a Dec. 10 reception celebrating the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Foster Care Independence Act of 1999.
She claimed the assault came in response to her efforts to bar transgender women from using women’s restrooms on federal property, writing in a Dec. 10 post on X that she was “physically accosted…by a pro-tr*ns man.”
McIntyre pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault charges. Those charges are no longer being pursued, according to an April 1 filing in D.C. Superior Court.
Government attorneys did not provide a reason for the dismissal in their “noelle prosequi” filing, which is Latin for “not to wish to prosecute.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that it is a “fallacy” to think tariffs will help the country’s economy as President Trump gears up to impose massive reciprocal tariffs on U.S. trading partners.
Paul, who has spoken out against tariffs previously, joined The Hill’s “Rising” on Wednesday, where he discussed his disagreement with tariffs, calling them “a tax.”
“On tariffs, I think it’s just economically — it’s a fallacy to think that it’ll help the country,” the Kentucky senator said. “Tariffs are a tax, and if you tax trade or if you tax anything, you’ll get less of it.”
Four Republicans — Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Mitch McConnell (Ky.) — have indicated publicly or privately that they would vote for the resolution, according to Senate Democrats.
Paul, who is a co-sponsor of the measure, said Trump’s tariff war against Canada is bad for the economy and an end-run around Congress, which he says has sole constitutional authority to raise taxes.
“Trade is a good thing. Trade is proportional to prosperity, and so tariffs are bad economically,” he said. “It’s a terrible idea to run a country by emergency where representatives to vote on raising or lowering taxes.”
Paul said tariffs “are bad for the country, bad for prosperity, bad for the economy.”
The latest national survey by Marquette University comes a day after a Musk-backed candidate lost in Wisconsin
Elon Musk has been everywhere in the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term. It’s not playing well with voters.
From the Oval Office sporting a tech support t-shirt with his son, to increasingly regular Fox News interviews and bearing a cheesehead hat on the campaign trail in Wisconsin, Musk has popped up across the country throwing his support behind the administration.
But the tech billionaire running the Department of Government Efficiency has become a lightning rod in national politics, with Democrats railing against Musk and DOGE’s potential cuts. And a new poll finds that voters don’t approve of his efforts.
The national poll by Marquette University Law School released Wednesday shows a majority of adults surveyed disapproved of Musk, and distaste for his work at DOGE as he plans to dramatically remake the federal government.
Approval of how Musk is handling his work at DOGE is at 41 percent, with disapproval at 58 percent. For Musk himself, 60 percent of those surveyed reported an unfavorable view, compared with 38 percent with a favorable one.
The voluntary decision to accept disbarment avoids potentially protracted proceedings over whether Hunter Biden’s two prior criminal cases required him to lose his law license.
Hunter Biden has agreed to give up his license to practice law in Washington, D.C., as a result of his criminal record.
The D.C. Bar’s Board on Professional Responsibility, which oversees attorney discipline proceedings, revealed the decision by former President Joe Biden’s son in a series of filings made public this week.
The voluntary decision to accept disbarment avoids potentially protracted proceedings over whether Hunter Biden’s two prior criminal cases required him to lose his law license. Last June, he was convicted of owning a gun while using illegal drugs and lying on a gun-purchase form about his drug use. And in September, he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other tax crimes.
A former canvasser for Elon Musk’s America PAC operation—which mobilized voters to sign a sketchy “petition” during last year’s presidential election—has sued the billionaire, accusing him and his political organization of failing to pay him at least $20,000.
The former canvasser, who is described as a Philadelphia man, hasn’t revealed his real name, for fear of retaliation. “For his safety and security, Plaintiff John Doe is proceeding under a pseudonym,” the suit states.
During the presidential election, Musk mobilized voters in swing states to sign a vague petition in “support of the Constitution.” Only people who were registered to vote could sign the petition. To drive broader and broader adoption of the initiative, America PAC initially claimed it would pay canvassers $47 for each person that they successfully convinced to sign the petition. It later upped the offer to $100. Due to Musk’s close proximity to the Trump campaign and his open and vocal support of Trump, the initiative was almost immediately accused of being a paid voter registration drive and/or a vote-buying scheme, both of which are illegal.
Doe, who canvassed for America PAC and Musk’s other org, Group America, LLC, claims he was never paid the referral money that he’s owed. “Defendants have since failed to pay Plaintiff and Class Members in full for their signatures and referrals,” the lawsuit states. “Leading up to the November 2024 election, while canvassing in Pennsylvania, Plaintiff referred many voters to sign the America PAC petition,” it says. “While Plaintiff was paid his hourly rate for canvassing, and he was paid some referrals for the petition signatures he obtained (albeit well after he performed the work to obtain these referrals), Plaintiff estimates that he has not been paid at least $20,000 he is owed for his referrals.”
ELON MUSK is having one of his worst days since entering politics — seeing his financial and personal influence beaten back, absorbing a hit to his wealth and watching President DONALD TRUMP look for an exit door for his role in the West Wing.
Musk and groups he backed spent $20 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race whose outcome, he said, could affect “the entire destiny of humanity.”
On Tuesday night, his candidate lost by 10 points.
As the sun rose today, Musk’s company, Tesla, announced a 13 percent drop in quarterly sales — the firm’s largest plunge ever, underperforming analysts’ already-bleak estimates.
Much of Musk’s vast wealth comes from Tesla, a stock market wunderkind which, in the 15 years since its initial public offering, has exploded into one of the most valuable companies in history. But its valuation has plummeted since the election, driven in no small part by Musk’s controversial role in the White House.
That, too, looks like it’s coming to an end.
The DOGE chief, who has jubilantly barreled through the federal bureaucracy since Trump took office, is staring down a late May or early June deadline, after which his “special government employee” designation will mandate he cease his work.
Against a backdrop of Musk’s low favorability ratings, reported tiffs with Cabinet secretaries and the Wisconsin loss — which Democrats, and Musk himself, framed as a referendum on the billionaire — Trump has informed his inner circle that Musk will retreat after his status terminates, our RACHAEL BADEreports.
It’s a reversal from just a month ago, when White House officials were prepared to find a way around the 130-day limit.
And to rub salt in the wound, a new poll released today out of Milwaukee-based Marquette University found approval of how Musk is handling his work at DOGE stands at 41 percent, with disapproval at 58 percent, our ALI BIANCOreports. Musk’s personal favorability, the poll found, is 38 percent, with 60 percent of respondents viewing him unfavorably.
Taken together, Musk’s rotten day spells trouble for a man who may finally be reaching the limits of his rapid political ascent.
Across the party, there’s a push to refocus on economic issues even as some worry the president’s tariffs could cause short-term harm.
After Tuesday night’s elections, Republicans are starting to worry that the shock and awe of President Donald Trump’s second term will haunt them in the 2026 midterms.
Inside the GOP, there is a growing sense that the party should get back to basics and focus on the pocketbook issues that many voters sent them to Washington to address. There’s internal disagreement about the effects of Trump’s new tariffs announced on Wednesday. Some say they will ultimately lead to reviving American manufacturing — but even many of the president’s allies fear they could drive up prices and potentially crash the economy.
The Republican anxiety comes in the wake of a landslide defeat in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and double-digit underperformance in two Florida special elections. Both reverberated across the party on Wednesday, as some Republican elected officials and strategists called for Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk to adopt a more cautious approach to governing.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), one of the most vulnerable GOP senators facing reelection next year, said in an interview that Republicans must be “smart and measured” otherwise they risk a major backlash at the polls. Tillis pointed to the early opposition against then-President Barack Obama, which led to a 2010 wave election where Democrats lost a number of seats in the House, Senate and state legislatures, including the North Carolina House where Tillis was subsequently elected speaker by the new GOP majority.
“What we don’t want to do is overreach,” said Tillis. “We’ve got to be careful not to do the same thing. And I think that these elections are going to be proxies, or almost like weather devices for figuring out what kind of storm we’re going to be up against next year.”
Brian Reisinger, a former GOP strategist and rural policy expert, said Republicans running in battleground races next year must pay attention to Tuesday’s disappointing results and zero in on bread-and-butter issues.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said Wednesday it had frozen federal funds for some Maine education programs over the state’s refusal to ban transgender students from girls’ and women’s sports as ordered by President Trump and his administration.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the freeze following a letter sent to Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) explaining funding would be paused “for certain administrative and technological functions in schools.”
A spokesperson for the department did not answer emailed questions asking which specific programs the agency had paused funding for. The pause does not affect federal feeding programs or direct assistance, according to a news release.
The USDA is also reviewing the state’s research and education-related funding “for compliance with the Constitution,” federal law and “the priorities of the Trump administration,” Rollins wrote. She pointed specifically to Title IX, the federal law against sex discrimination, and Title VI, which bars discrimination based on race and ethnicity.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) on Wednesday pushed back against Attorney General Pam Bondi after the Justice Department head criticized the Texas Democrat’s comments about tech billionaire Elon Musk being “taken down” multiple times.
“To have her go on Fox News, and to then decide that she wanted to send a threat to me, it was wrong,” Crockett said during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing.
“Because here it is, she is the highest law enforcement agent in this country and people are watching and they are consuming this information, and they are believing that simply because I decided that I wanted to exercise my right to free speech — which I am not abridged from doing — that she then wanted to then politicize something that should not be politicized. I don’t like Elon Musk, I’m going to say it 50,000 times.”
A coalition of health researchers, unions and other stakeholders filed a lawsuit Wednesday challenging the abrupt cancellation of billions of dollars in research grants by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as unconstitutional.
The coalition, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), argues the administration’s “ongoing ideological purge of hundreds of critical research projects” violates federal law and asks a court to stop the cancellations and order the funding restored.
The lawsuit, filed in Massachusetts district court, said there was no “scientifically-valid explanation or cause” for the NIH to cancel the research projects.
The NIH attempted to justify the first wave of its sweeping grant cancellations by citing connections to “gender identity” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), without defining these terms or explaining how they apply to the terminated research.
The agency “has not highlighted any genuine concerns with the rigor of projects or any underlying data; in a matter of weeks it has just declared them all ‘unscientific,’” the lawsuit stated.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will impose a 10 percent tariff on imports from all countries around the world and will slap an additional, individualized tariff on approximately 60 countries his administration believes have the most unfair trade relationships with the U.S.
That includes a 34 percent tariff on China, and a 20 percent tariff on the European Union.
Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on Wednesday said he “won’t apologize” for telling a fired Health and Human Services (HHS) employee that he “probably deserved it,” after video footage of the exchange was widely circulated on social media.
The viral video showed former HHS employee Mack Schroeder approaching Banks in a Senate office building on Tuesday and asking him about the mass layoffs at HHS. Schroeder, who noted that he personally was among the fired HHS employees, asked the senator how he would ensure residents in his state got the services they needed.
“You probably deserved it,” Banks told Schroeder, referring to Schroeder’s termination. When Schroeder asked why, Banks told him, “Because you seem like a clown.”
Banks, in a video posted to the social platform X on Wednesday, further dug his heels in, refusing to “back down” from his position.
In a test of the mood in the wake of Musk’s tenure atop DOGE, persuasive evidence emerged in Florida that the tech mogul has become a political liability.
From the time the Donald Trump-Elon Musk governing partnership took shape, it’s had an expiration date attached to it. The relationship wasn’t built to last — the egos were too big, the principals too mercurial, the politics surrounding the world’s richest man’s efforts to reshape the federal government too radioactive.
Now, POLITICO’s Rachael Bade reports, it’s coming to an end. In the coming weeks, Musk will begin dialing back his role in Washington. Trump has told his inner circle and members of his Cabinet that both men have agreed he’ll be transitioning out of the administration and his polarizing role atop the DOGE initiative and stepping into a more supportive role.
For Republicans, Musk’s departure can’t come soon enough. On Tuesday, in the first big test of the national mood in the wake of Musk’s slashing tenure atop DOGE, persuasive evidence emerged that the tech mogul has become a political liability.
It wasn’t just the outcome in Wisconsin, where Democrats won a contentious swing-state Supreme Court race that functioned as a referendum on Musk. It was the results in Florida, in one of the nation’s most rock-ribbed Republican House districts, that suggested Musk’s political blast radius could be a problem for the GOP going into the 2026 midterm elections.
There were two special House elections in Florida Tuesday, both in comfortably Republican districts where Democrats typically don’t have a prayer. It was clear going in that Democrats were poised to overperform in each of them — a result of grassroots rage toward Trump and the party’s frequent advantage in special and off-year elections.
The Democratic nominees in both districts indeed ran better than expected — far better than in 2024 — but in the end, the GOP held both seats. Yet the Republican victory in Florida’s Panhandle-based 1st District obscured a troubling harbinger that appears to be connected to Musk — a loss in Pensacola’s Escambia County.
President Donald Trump’s trade action hits several largely uninhabited places with little trade with anyone.
The list of 185 places hit Wednesday with a minimum 10 percent tariff include Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, Australian territories in the vast Indian Ocean between Africa and Antarctica.
Also on the list are tiny Norfolk Island in the South Pacific and an uninhabited spot in the Arctic Ocean called Jan Mayen, part of a Norwegian territory with the islands of Svalbard near the North Pole.
It’s all led to some head-scratching around the world as leaders digest Trump’s effort to punish countries that he says have taken advantage of U.S. trade policy to steal American jobs.
“I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States, but that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on earth is exempt from this,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
The presence of such obscure locales might seem to undercut Trump’s tariff argument that other countries have been taking advantage of the U.S. and should be punished as a result. Asked about the issue, the White House told POLITICO that Norfolk, as well as the Heard and McDonald Islands, were listed because they are Australian territories.
Still, the White House list left many people puzzled — and rushing to the internet for answers.
A bipartisan trio of lawmakers is asking Mark Zuckerberg for internal documents.
Senators are probing Meta for its work to develop a presence in China, even in the wake of the company’s moves to boost its Republican credentials in President Donald Trump’s Washington.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism will hold a hearing to scrutinize the parent company of Facebook and Instagram next Wednesday, which will be titled, “A Time for Truth: Oversight of Meta’s Foreign Relations and Representations to the United States Congress.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair of the subcommittee, joined the leadership of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to ask Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a host of internal records relating to the company’s work in China.
The letter to Zuckerberg dated April 1 cites a recent book from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams that chronicles the company’s plans to build its business in China.
“Facebook’s plan reportedly included more engagement with the CCP, and later included plans to partner with a Chinese company to build censorship tools and provide the CCP with user data,” wrote Hawley, alongside Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chair Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and its ranking member, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).
The lawmakers asked for a wide range of internal Meta documents, including records around the company’s business in China from 2014 to today and content that had been suppressed in connection to requests from Chinese officials.
The mass pardon has resulted in confusion in the courts.
A federal appeals court has rejected the Justice Department’s claim that President Donald Trump’s pardon of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol is so broad that it sweeps in convictions for illegal possession of weapons five months later.
In a ruling Wednesday, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel split, 2-1, in turning down Kentucky resident Dan Wilson’s bid to avoid reporting back to prison this week to serve the remaining time on his five-year sentence on charges of possessing an unregistered firearm and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Wilson was a member of the mob that stormed the Capitol and was charged with multiple crimes related to his conduct on Jan. 6. During the FBI’s broad criminal probe of the riot, investigators found an arsenal of illegal firearms at his home. The weapons were not connected to his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack.
Barring intervention from the Supreme Court or some further action by Trump, the appeals court ruling seems likely to result in Wilson returning to prison on the weapons charges. His lawyer, George Pallas, told the appeals court that Wilson was slated to report back to prison on Wednesday.
Pallas told POLITICO he intends to appeal the ruling as far as the Supreme Court and may ask Trump to issue a new pardon to stave off Wilson’s return to prison. “By again pardoning Wilson, he will show the courts that he has the upper hand,” Pallas said, lamenting attempts by judges to “second-guess President Trump.”
Stanley Woodward is Trump’s nominee to be associate attorney general.
President Donald Trump named yet another veteran of his criminal cases to the upper ranks of the Justice Department on Wednesday, nominating attorney Stanley Woodward as associate attorney general, the department’s third-ranking position.
Woodward never directly represented Trump but was a key architect of the legal pushback to the criminal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith. He represented Trump’s personal aide, Walt Nauta, in the case Smith brought over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
And Woodward has long been a go-to lawyer for Trump’s inner circle. He has spent years representing Trump’s social media muse Dan Scavino in grand jury proceedings, civil cases and before the House’s Jan. 6 select committee. Other Woodward clients have included:
Kash Patel, a witness in the classified documents case who is now Trump’s FBI director;
Peter Navarro, who was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the House’s Jan. 6 investigation;
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), after his phone was seized by investigators working with Smith; and
House GOP leaders, who filed a legal brief arguing against the validity of Congress’ effort to hold Trump ally Steve Bannon in contempt.
Trump’s Liberation Day announcement of 20 percent tariffs on the EU go against the “free enterprise and competition” that “have laid the foundations of the West’s success,” Swedish PM says.
European leaders reacted with dismay to punishing new American tariffs announced by U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday, vowing to retaliate in unison.
Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement slapped a 20 percent tariff on all imports from the 27-nation European Union. “They rip us off,” Trump said. “It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.”
The tariffs drew a swift rebuke and a promise to respond in kind from EU capitals, which had long been bracing for Trump’s economic smackdown.
Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin said the tariffs were “bad for the world economy” and would harm transatlantic relations.
“We see no justification for this,” Martin said. “More than €4.2 billion worth of goods and services are traded between the EU and the U.S. daily. Disrupting this deeply integrated relationship benefits no one.”
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson had similar comments, arguing the tariffs went against the “free enterprise and competition” that “have laid the foundations of the West’s success.”
“That’s why Americans can listen to music on Swedish Spotify and we Swedes can listen to the same music on our American iPhones,” he said. “This is why I deeply regret the path the U.S. has embarked upon, seeking to limit trade with higher tariffs.”
President Trump unveiled tariffs of at least 10% Wednesday on virtually the entire world, with one notable exception: Russia.
The intrigue: Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios Wednesday that Russia was left off because U.S. sanctions already "preclude any meaningful trade." However, the U.S. still trades more with Russia than with countries like Mauritius or Brunei that did make Trump's tariffs list.
Even remote island territories like Tokelau (pop. 1,500) in the South Pacific and Svalbard (pop. 2,500) in the Arctic Circle — territories of New Zealand and Norway, respectively —were listed for tariffs.
However, Leavitt noted that Cuba, Belarus and North Korea were also not included because existing tariffs and sanctions on them are already so high.
Breaking it down: The value of U.S.-Russia trade plummeted from around $35 billion in 2021 to $3.5 billion as of last year due to sanctions imposed over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has asked Trump to lift some of those sanctions as part of the U.S.-mediated ceasefire talks, which have largely stalled.
Trump threatened Russia with secondary tariffs on oil earlier this week. He also said he was "pissed off" at Russian leader Vladimir Putin over his recent comments about Ukraine.
Leavitt noted that Russia could still face "additional strong sanctions."
Worth noting: The other two major economies excluded from Trump's otherwise exhaustive list were Canada and Mexico. Leavitt confirmed that was because Trump already imposed 25% tariffs on both.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Val Kilmer, the brooding, versatile actor who played fan favorite Iceman in “Top Gun,” donned a voluminous cape as Batman in “Batman Forever” and portrayed Jim Morrison in “The Doors,” has died. He was 65.
Kilmer died Tuesday night in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, his daughter, Mercedes Kilmer, said in an email to The Associated Press. The New York Times was the first to report his death on Tuesday.
Val Kilmer died from pneumonia. He had recovered after a 2014 throat cancer diagnosis that required two tracheotomies.
“I have behaved poorly. I have behaved bravely. I have behaved bizarrely to some. I deny none of this and have no regrets because I have lost and found parts of myself that I never knew existed,” he says toward the end of “Val,” the 2021 documentary on his career. “And I am blessed.”
The American migrants heading for Mexico to flee Trump
While Donald Trump is attempting to crack down on migrants crossing the US’s southern border, some Americans are heading in the opposite direction, setting up new lives in Mexico to escape Trump’s America. Many point to increased discrimination, anti-immigrant rhetoric and the erosion of civil rights under Trump as the factors that drove them to leave.
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Musical interlude
Today’s featured artist: Abe Laboriel (and his sons)
