Hegseth says Musk did not see plan for potential war with China
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth said that Elon Musk was not shown the Pentagon’s plan for a potential war with China during the Tesla CEO’s visit earlier today.
“Elon Musk is a patriot. Elon Musk is an innovator. Elon Musk provides a lot of capabilities our government and our military rely on, and I’m grateful for that,” said Hegseth, who added that reports Musk would be shown the plan were meant to “undermine whatever relationship the Pentagon has with” him.
“We welcomed him today to the Pentagon to talk about [the department of government efficiency], to talk about efficiencies, to talk about innovations. It was a great informal conversation. The rest of that reporting was fake. There was no war plans. There was no Chinese war plans. There was no secret plans. That’s not what we were doing the Pentagon.”
Key events
Martin Pengelly
A Republican US representative from Utah faced a town hall audience on Thursday night and made a rather surprising statement: the US will drift towards authoritarianism “if we don’t get the executive branch under control”.
That earned Celeste Maloy applause – which turned to boos when she added: “When Biden was president, I had the same concern.”
Democrats charge Donald Trump with authoritarian leanings and actions, particularly as he stokes a stand-off with federal judges who have ruled against him.
Town halls have become treacherous territory for Republicans thanks to Trump’s brutal attacks on federal budgets and staffing, overseen by Elon Musk, Trump’s very evidently un-elected, and very evidently super-rich, donor, confidant and ally.
ABC News reports that Malloy, a member of the House appropriations committee, faced a “boisterous audience in liberal Salt Lake City” with Mike Kennedy, another Utah Republican.
They told their audience they opposed some Trump cuts, such as to the National Parks Service, but Malloy said: “We are not going to get out of the situation we’re in financially without all of us feeling some pain.”
Kennedy prompted jeers when he defended Trump moves including eviscerating the US Agency for International Development.
According to ABC, “Voters from both parties said after the town hall they had hoped to hear more about social security. Dozens of the program’s offices across the country are slated to close due to actions taken by Elon Musk’s [so-called] ‘department of government efficiency’”, or Doge.
Musk’s unsubstantiated claims of massive social security fraud – and his apparent desire to cut the benefits program – are proving damaging for Republicans.
Addressing her own town hall this week, the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski – no stranger to crossing Trump – said: “It doesn’t help the president when you have somebody who clearly is not worried about whether or not social security benefits are going to be there for him” working on social security reform.
“It worries Americans all over the country. This is why social security has been kind of viewed as the untouchable from a political perspective.”
The day so far
Elon Musk visited the Pentagon this morning amid multiple reports that military officials would share with him their confidential plan for war with China. A little bit later in the Oval Office, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth took questions after announcing a “state of the art” fighter jet program, where the defense secretary denied that Musk had been shown the plan, or that such a disclosure was ever being considered. The president, meanwhile, outlined how functions handled by the Department of Education would be moved to other agencies now that he has ordered it closed, and also said there would be “flexibility” in his new tariff regimen.
Here’s what else has happened today so far:
-
Trump professed his love for King Charles and said he would be open to a reported offer that the United States join the Commonwealth.
-
Responding to reports that some of the suspected Venezuelan gang members deported to El Salvador last weekend were not in any gang, Trump said investigators would look into that, while defending his hardline immigration policies.
-
John F Kennedy’s assassination came up in Trump’s encounter with the press, when a reporter asked him who killed the former president. Trump did not say, instead explaining why he allowed documents to be released with Social Security numbers and other identifying details included.
Meanwhile, a Venezuelan government minister denied that any of the more than 200 migrants the Trump administration deported to El Salvador last weekend weekend were members of the gang Tren de Aragua, Reuters reports.
Donald Trump and the justice department have insisted the migrants were members of the group, and therefore eligible for swift deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. From Reuters, here’s what Venezuela’s government thinks of that:
Venezuelan’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said on Friday that no one among the hundreds of deportees to a Salvadoran prison, whom Washington accused of being members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, were related to the criminal organization.
Cabello cited a list of names disclosed in U.S. and from one of his own sources, speaking in a podcast shared on his Telegram channel.
U.S. President Donald Trump had on Saturday invoked an obscure wartime law to rapidly deport people who were, according to the White House, members of the Venezuelan gang which Washington has declared a terrorist group and alien enemy.
Despite a judge quickly blocking the measure, Trump’s administration deported 137 Venezuelans to El Salvador where they were detained in the country’s massive anti-terrorism prison, for a period of a year subject to renewal.
Meanwhile, families and lawyers have been seeking answers about relatives and clients whom they could no longer reach, and demanding their return to Venezuela.
“I believe with absolute responsibility that not a single one (of the names on the list) appears on the organizational chart of the now-extinct Tren de Aragua organization, not a single one,” Cabello said.
Venezuela says Tren de Aragua was effectively wiped out after a series of raids in 2023, and that the idea that it still exists is based on a claim from the country’s political opposition.
“It is a lie, a massive lie, and we have the means to prove it,” he added. “Now if the United States refuses to recognize this reality, that’s their prerogative.”
Trump signals ‘flexibility’ on new tariffs he will impose on 2 April
Donald Trump has talked up the new tariffs he has promised to impose on countries worldwide on 2 April, so much so that he’s taking to calling the date “Liberation Day”.
On that date, the president has ordered the United States to impose “reciprocal” tariffs on trading partners around the world, which will be equal to whatever levies they place on US goods. Exemptions from 25% tariffs that he has given Canada and Mexico will also end on that day.
It will likely amount to a a major reordering of the United State’s relations with its trading partners, and have major implications for the US economy. Yet for all his talk of tariffs, Trump has indicated that he may change his mind.
The latest came just now in the Oval Office, where he said there will be “flexibility” with the new tariffs.
“People are coming to me and talking about tariffs, and a lot of people are asking me if they could have exceptions. And once you do that for one, you have to do that for all,” Trump said.
“The word flexibility is an important word. Sometimes there’s flexibility, so there’ll be flexibility.”
Trump has moved on, and is now, once again, talking about making Canada the 51st state.
But a reporter wanted to know if he was worried that Canada would be a blue state, if it was somehow admitted to the union. The president demurred:
I don’t know about that. I think Canada is a place, like a lot of other places, if you have a good candidate, the candidate’s gonna win.
Donald Trump, who is continuing to take questions in the Oval Office with Pete Hegseth by his side, said he would not have allowed the military’s plan for a potential war with China to be shared with Elon Musk or anyone like him.
“I don’t want other people seeing, anybody seeing potential war with China. We don’t want to have a potential war with China, but I can tell you, if we did, we’re very well equipped to handle it,” Trump said.
The possibility that Musk could see the plan raised alarms, as he has business interests in China. Trump said he was aware of that:
You know, Elon has businesses in China, and he would be susceptible, perhaps, to that, but it was such a fake story.
Hegseth says Musk did not see plan for potential war with China
Defense secretary Pete Hegseth said that Elon Musk was not shown the Pentagon’s plan for a potential war with China during the Tesla CEO’s visit earlier today.
“Elon Musk is a patriot. Elon Musk is an innovator. Elon Musk provides a lot of capabilities our government and our military rely on, and I’m grateful for that,” said Hegseth, who added that reports Musk would be shown the plan were meant to “undermine whatever relationship the Pentagon has with” him.
“We welcomed him today to the Pentagon to talk about [the department of government efficiency], to talk about efficiencies, to talk about innovations. It was a great informal conversation. The rest of that reporting was fake. There was no war plans. There was no Chinese war plans. There was no secret plans. That’s not what we were doing the Pentagon.”
The Trump administration carried out the high-profile deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members over the weekend, which may have violated a judge’s order.
The deportees were sent to El Salvador, but since they arrived, their family members have offered evidence that they were not members of Tren de Aragua, the gang whose members Trump has targeted for rapid deportation under the Alien Enemies Act.
Asked about the possibility some of the deportees were not gang members, Trump said:
I was told that they went through a very strong vetting process, and that will also be continuing in El Salvador, and if there’s anything like that, we would certainly want to find out. But … these were a bad group. This was a bad group, and they were in bad areas, and they were with a lot of other people that were absolutely killers, murderers, and people that were really bad, with the worst records you’ve ever seen.
Much of the Trump administration’s case against the deportees seems to center on their tattoos:
Donald Trump is now taking questions from reporters in the room, and the first was a blunt ask for the president to “tell us who killed Kennedy”.
Earlier in the week, Trump released 80,000 pages of government documents related to the assassination of John F Kennedy. Trump did not answer the question of who killed Kennedy, instead saying of the documents: “I don’t think there’s anything that’s earth shattering, but you’ll have to make that determination.”
He also weighed in on why he allowed social security numbers and other identifying details to be revealed in the Kennedy documents, saying “I didn’t want anything deleted.”
Trump added that he would release government documents concerning the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Donald Trump is delivering his speech from the Oval Office, seated at his desk next to what appears to be an image of the F-47 fighter jet.
It’s a little hard to make it out, though.
Trump announces ‘state of the art’ F-47 fighter jet program
Donald Trump has now shifted to defense, unveiling the F-47 fighter jet program, which he promises will deliver a “state of the art” stealth jet.
“The F-47 will be the most advanced, most capable, most lethal aircraft ever built. An experimental version of the plane has secretly been flying for almost five years, and we’re confident that it massively overpowers the capabilities of any other nation,” Trump said.
“The F-47 is equipped with state-of-the-art stealth technology. It’s virtually unseeable and unprecedented power, the most power of any jet of its kind ever made.”
Its designation may be an homage to Trump, who is the 47th president.
Trump says Small Business Administration to handle student loans as education department dismantled
Donald Trump is speaking now in the Oval Office with defense secretary Pete Hegseth by his side, but began by elaborating on how he will implement his executive order yesterday ordering the dismantling of the Department of Education.
“I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler, terrific person, will handle all of the student loan portfolio,” Trump said.
“We have a portfolio that’s very large, lots of loans, tens of thousands of loans, pretty complicated deal, and that’s coming out of the Department of Education immediately.”
He added that the Department of Health and Human Services “will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.”
Donald Trump spent much of this week touting his efforts to secure a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine. But as the Guardian’s Andrew Roth reports, what Trump says and what his negotiating partners understand are often two different things:
Donald Trump’s shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine has at times resembled a game of broken telephone, and the US president’s disregard for the details suggests the ceasefire he seeks is further off than his bullish statements may suggest.
Consider the events of just the last week. After his call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, Trump said that the two men had agreed to a partial ceasefire on “energy and infrastructure” targets, indicating that Russia would not target bridges, hospitals, railways or other civilian structures.
Hours later, a Russian drone slammed into a Ukrainian hospital. Russia’s readout of the call said that it had agreed to a halt on strikes on “energy infrastructure”, suggesting that everything else was fair game.
By Wednesday, the White House press secretary was dodging the question of what was discussed, pointing reporters to the administration’s readout without clarifying if Trump had misunderstood their discussion.
That day, Trump surprised the world by announcing that the US was proposing an American-led privatisation of Ukrainian power plants in order to provide a new security guarantee to the Ukrainians. Trump ordered his national security adviser Mike Waltz and secretary of state Marco Rubio to provide an “accurate” readout of the call (in itself a curious distinction). In it, they said Trump had told Zelenskyy that “American ownership of those plants could be the best protection for that infrastructure.”
Not so fast, said Zelenskyy on Thursday. The power plants are national property and “belong to all Ukrainians”. A takeover bid had never come up.
Reporters at the Pentagon have spotted Elon Musk leaving, after what the New York Times reports was an 80-minute meeting with defense secretary Pete Hegseth.
It is unclear if Musk, who leads Donald Trump’s department of government efficiency initiative and has business interests in China, was briefed on the military’s plan for a potential war with Beijing. But the Times reports that Musk’s meeting with Hegseth did not take place in a secure Pentagon conference room where it was originally scheduled to take place.
Trump to announce new jet fighter program in White House speech – report
Donald Trump and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are scheduled to at 11am deliver a joint address from the Oval Office, but the White House did not say what it will concern. The Wall Street Journal seems to have uncovered the answer: they will announce a new fighter jet program.
The new jet will be the most expensive in history, and operate alongside drones, according to the Journal, which adds the plane is geared towards fending off China’s air force in the event of a war.
Here’s more, from the Journal:
The piloted planes are to be fielded in the 2030s and would fight alongside semiautonomous drones, as the Pentagon seeks to gain a technological edge over U.S. adversaries.
The future of the program had been in doubt after the Biden administration opted to leave the final decision on how to proceed to the incoming Trump administration. Elon Musk, the billionaire and Trump ally, has publicly campaigned against manned aircraft, which he said were “obsolete in the age of drones.”
Musk arrived at the Pentagon Friday morning for sensitive discussions about China.
Air Force officials have argued that piloted planes are still vital for fighting the wars of the future, especially if they incorporate cutting-edge designs, sophisticated sensors, more powerful engines and control the semiautonomous drones that operate with them.
…
Fielding the plane will be expensive, as the new fighters could cost as much as several hundred million dollars each. The Air Force’s current Lockheed Martin F-35 fighters cost about $80 million.
The F-35, which has been a Musk target, is a multi-role plane that is designed mainly for air-to-ground combat. The new fighter has been described as an air-to-air fighter that would replace the F-22 and would be able to fly in heavily defended environments.
Donald Trump is so excited about the reciprocal tariffs he plans to impose on 2 April that he has taken to calling it “Liberation Day”.
As he did in a Truth Social post this morning:
April 2nd is Liberation Day in America!!! For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the World, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Good Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY, and RESPECT, BACK. GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!
But a recent poll conducted for the Guardian shows that Americans are generally freaked out by the prospect of the United States imposing tariffs on countries worldwide, including a hefty share of Republicans:
Trump signals openness to reported UK offer of Commonwealth spot to ease tensions with Canada
Donald Trump is partaking in some royal intrigue with a social media post declaring his love for Britain’s King Charles and saying he would welcome a reported “secret offer” billed as easing tensions with Canada.
On Truth Social, the president linked to a story in UK tabloid the Sun, which says:
KING Charles will reportedly make a “secret offer” to Donald Trump during his State visit.
The Royal proposal is said to potentially reduce tensions between the White House and Canada.
Plans are allegedly in the works to make the USA the next “associate member” of the Commonwealth.
The international association, which currently boasts 56 states, could welcome the US as a new member.
In February, a Tariff war began between the two countries with Trump signing orders to impose near-universal tariffs on goods from Canada entering the United States.
The US President revealed Canada could avoid higher taxes if it joined the United States of America as its 51 state.
Canada, of which the King is head of state, is part of the Commonwealth of Nations and including America may dampen the current conflict.
To which Trump responded:
I Love King Charles. Sounds good to me!
But trade tensions with Canada are likely to grow worse on 2 April, when an exemption from 25% tariffs he imposed on the country expires.
Musk arrives at Pentagon amid reports he’ll be briefed on China war plan
Journalists at the Pentagon have spotted Elon Musk arriving for a visit where he will reportedly be briefed on the military’s plan for a potential war with China.
Donald Trump and defense secretary Pete Hegseth have both denied the reports that details of the military’s strategy against China will be shared with Musk.
The US government appears to have complied with a federal judge’s request for a high-level official to confirm that it is considering invoking a nation security exemption to avoid sharing details of migrant deportation flights that may have violated a court order.
Justice department attorneys have been in a legal standoff with James Boasberg, a federal judge who over the weekend told the Trump administration not to allow three planes carrying suspected Venezuelan gang members to fly to El Salvador. The planes arrived anyway, and Boasberg has since been demanding details of the aircrafts’ itineraries to determine if his order was violated.
The justice department has said the Trump administration may determine the information is a “state secret” that it cannot reveal to the judge. Yesterday, Boasberg demanded that the administration have “a person with direct involvement in the Cabinet-level discussions” submit a declaration. That declaration has now arrived, from Todd Blanche, a deputy attorney general, who confirmed his “direct involvement in ongoing Cabinet-level discussions regarding invocation of the state-secrets privilege.”
The government now has until next Tuesday to decide whether to invoke the privilege. Here’s more on the back-and-forth between the judge and the Trump administration:
