US trade court blocks Trump’s tariffs
A federal trade court on Wednesday blocked Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law.
The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump had exceeded his authority, left US trade policy dependent on his whims, and unleashed economic chaos.
“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the court ruled, referring to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. “The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined.”
The panel, composed of judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Trump, questioned the US president’s use of the law, which does not mention tariffs. The ruling was per curiam, meaning that it was written on behalf of the full court.
Trump is the only president who has claimed the authority to impose import taxes based on the statute.
Tariffs must be approved by Congress, but Trump has asserted he has the power to act unilaterally because the country’s trade deficits amount to what he calls a national emergency.
The lawsuit was filed by a group of small businesses, including a wine importer, VOS Selections, whose owner has said the tariffs are having a major impact and his company may not survive.
Trump imposed tariffs on most of the countries in the world in an effort to reverse the US’s massive and longstanding trade deficits. He earlier put import taxes on goods from Canada, China and Mexico, claiming that it was necessary to combat the illegal trafficking of fentanyl into the United States. The court also blocked what it called the “trafficking tariffs” “because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders”.
The court also noted the wild swings in tariff levels, as Trump has announced and then backed down from high tariffs on specific countries or trading blocs over the past two months. The president was asked by a CNBC correspondent on Wednesday to respond to the fact that Wall Street analysts had started to refer to certain trades made in the expectation that he would impose and then back down from tariffs as “Taco trades”, an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. He was not happy to hear the phrase.
Key events
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Closing summary
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Elon Musk says his work as a government employee is over
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US health service stops work on mRNA vaccines to combat potential flu pandemic – report
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Trade court agrees that Trump exceeded his authority to impose tariffs
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Trump has 10 days to rescind all tariffs, trade court rules
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US trade court blocks Trump’s tariffs
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US to ‘aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students’, Rubio says
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Justice department targets California for allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports
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Trump commutes sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader
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Trump pardons Michael Grimm, Staten Island Republican who menaced reporter
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Trump pardons reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were convicted of bank fraud
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Federal judge rules effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil likely unconstitutional
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Elon Musk tried to block Sam Altman’s big AI deal in the Middle East but Trump approved it anyway – WSJ
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Federal judge bars Trump administration from killing New York congestion pricing program
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The day so far
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Trump orders US chip designers to stop selling to China – Financial Times
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Trump nominates former personal attorney Emil Bove to serve as third circuit appeals court judge
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JD Vance says US should use bitcoin to its advantage in rivalry with China
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US agrees to end use of race and gender in awarding highway and transit contracts
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Trump administration closes state department’s office of analytic outreach
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Gifted Qatar plane is in the US and is ‘being refitted’, says Trump, adding ‘it’s much too big’
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Trump hesitant to impose new sanctions on Russia for fear of ‘screwing up’ a deal
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Trump says Harvard should have maybe a 15% cap on foreign students
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Trump says he told Israel’s Netanyahu not to act against Iran
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Trump says he will be negotiating the tax bill after Musk criticizes it
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‘We’ll respond differently’ to Putin if ‘he’s tapping us along’ on ending Ukraine war, says Trump
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Termination notices expected to go out to all remaining Voice of America employees this week – Politico
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US ‘assessing’ future of military presence in Africa, says top general
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White House to send Congress small spending package to formalize Doge cuts – Politico
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Marco Rubio announces new visa restriction policy for foreigners ‘who are complicit in censoring Americans’
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California changes high school sports rule after Trump post over trans athlete
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Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem tell Ice to supercharge immigrant arrests to 3,000 a day – Axios
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JD Vance to give keynote address to Las Vegas bitcoin conference
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White House cuts aid for states to modernize their unemployment insurance systems – Axios
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Trump asks supreme court to expand deportation powers
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Trump says it will cost $61bn for Canada to join Golden Dome scheme
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US stops scheduling visa interviews for foreign students
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Elon Musk criticizes Trump’s tax bill
Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will resume the work of chronicling it all in real time on Thursday. In the meantime, here are the day’s top developments:
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All of Donald Trump’s tariffs are illegal and must be removed, a three-judge panel at the US court of international trade ruled unanimously. The court found that the president simply does not have the sweeping power to impose tariffs he claimed and gave the administration 10 days to reverse all of his executive orders doing so. Sorry, Wall Street traders, no more Tacos.
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“The US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said in a statement.
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Trump nominated Emil Bove, his former personal attorney who previously defended him in the hush-money case and now holds a senior position in the justice department, to serve as a federal appeals judge.
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Elon Musk’s work here is done, he said in a post on his social media platform, but the work of his so-called “department of government efficiency” will continue, despite its reputation for making headline-grabbing claims about supposedly wasteful spending it had discovered, almost all of which have proved to be either wildly exaggerated or simply untrue.
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Trump’s pardon spree continued, with clemency granted to more political supporters convicted of financial fraud, including two of the president’s fellow reality TV stars and a former New York representative who once threatened a reporter with physical violence.
Elon Musk says his work as a government employee is over
In a post on his social media platform, Elon Musk suggested on Wednesday that his formal role in the Trump administration is ending.
“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote. “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government”, referring to the budget-cutting and downsizing team he called the “department of government efficiency”, which earned a reputation for making headline-grabbing claims about supposedly wasteful spending it had discovered, almost all of which proved to be either wildly exaggerated or simply untrue.
US health service stops work on mRNA vaccines to combat potential flu pandemic – report
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said recently that no one should be taking medical advice from him, but, according to the health news website Stat, Kennedy’s deep suspicion of the messenger RNA platform has led his department to cancel a nearly $600m contract with Moderna “to develop, test, and license vaccines for flu strains that could trigger future pandemics, including the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus”.
The cancellation was not unexpected, but it follows Kennedy’s decision to remove the federal recommendation for pregnant people and children to be vaccinated against Covid-19, suggesting that he is personally limiting the options for Americans who want to get vaccinated but rely on health insurance that will not pay for shots the government does not recommend.
For decades, since the 1918 flu pandemic killed millions of people, scientists have been preparing for the possibility that another pandemic strain of influenza could emerge. The order for Moderna to stop preparing to make mRNA vaccines for strains of the flu with pandemic potential will likely be seen as a setback for the nation’s pandemic preparedness.
In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic struck the United States, Trump insisted that he had no idea that his own White House had eliminated a team responsible for global health security, which was created by his predecessor, Barack Obama, to coordinate the response to pandemic threats.
The Washington Post reports that, despite what the Pentagon has said, “legal teams representing the US and Qatari governments have not finalized an agreement for transferring the luxury Boeing 747-8 jetliner that President Donald Trump wants for Air Force One amid outstanding requests by Qatar for Washington to clarify the transaction’s terms”.
According to the Post’s unnamed official sources, the issue is that “Qatar is insisting that a memorandum of understanding between Washington and Doha specify that the aircraft’s transfer was initiated by the Trump administration and that Qatar is not responsible for any future transfers of the plane’s ownership, these people said”.
Trade court agrees that Trump exceeded his authority to impose tariffs
Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, is one of the lawyers who filed the successful suit against Trump’s tariffs on behalf of five US businesses that import goods.
In a response to the sweeping victory on Wednesday in the US court of international trade, which ruled that all of Trump’s tariffs are illegal and must be removed, Somin wrote in a post on the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy that the three-judge panel had agreed with him that the president simply does not have the authority to impose tariffs without the consent of Congress.
Somin drew attention to this part of the court’s unanimous opinion:
The Constitution assigns Congress the exclusive powers to ‘lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises,’ and to ‘regulate Commerce with foreign Nations.’ U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cls. 1, 3. The question in the two cases before the court is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (‘IEEPA’) delegates these powers to the President in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country the court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder.
“From the very beginning,” Somin wrote, “I have contended that the virtually limitless nature of the authority claimed by Trump is a key reason why courts must strike down the tariffs.”
Trump has 10 days to rescind all tariffs, trade court rules
The US court of international trade judgment that all of Donald Trump’s executive orders imposing tariffs are “invalid as contrary to law” orders the administration to issue the necessary administrative orders to remove the tariffs “within 10 calendar days”.
The three-judge panel included Jane Restani, a Ronald Reagan appointee; Gary Katzmann, a Barack Obama appointee; and Timothy Reif, who was nominated by Trump in 2018 while serving as a senior advisor to Trump’s US trade representative, Robert Lighthizer.
US trade court blocks Trump’s tariffs
A federal trade court on Wednesday blocked Donald Trump from imposing sweeping tariffs on imports under an emergency-powers law.
The ruling from a three-judge panel at the New York-based court of international trade came after several lawsuits arguing Trump had exceeded his authority, left US trade policy dependent on his whims, and unleashed economic chaos.
“The Worldwide and Retaliatory Tariff Orders exceed any authority granted to the President by IEEPA to regulate importation by means of tariffs,” the court ruled, referring to the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. “The challenged Tariff Orders will be vacated and their operation permanently enjoined.”
The panel, composed of judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Trump, questioned the US president’s use of the law, which does not mention tariffs. The ruling was per curiam, meaning that it was written on behalf of the full court.
Trump is the only president who has claimed the authority to impose import taxes based on the statute.
Tariffs must be approved by Congress, but Trump has asserted he has the power to act unilaterally because the country’s trade deficits amount to what he calls a national emergency.
The lawsuit was filed by a group of small businesses, including a wine importer, VOS Selections, whose owner has said the tariffs are having a major impact and his company may not survive.
Trump imposed tariffs on most of the countries in the world in an effort to reverse the US’s massive and longstanding trade deficits. He earlier put import taxes on goods from Canada, China and Mexico, claiming that it was necessary to combat the illegal trafficking of fentanyl into the United States. The court also blocked what it called the “trafficking tariffs” “because they do not deal with the threats set forth in those orders”.
The court also noted the wild swings in tariff levels, as Trump has announced and then backed down from high tariffs on specific countries or trading blocs over the past two months. The president was asked by a CNBC correspondent on Wednesday to respond to the fact that Wall Street analysts had started to refer to certain trades made in the expectation that he would impose and then back down from tariffs as “Taco trades”, an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. He was not happy to hear the phrase.
Lauren Gambino
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the Federal Communications Commission, warned on Wednesday of the growing threat to press freedom by what she described as the Trump administration’s “campaign of censorship and control”.
Speaking in Los Angeles as part of her First Amendment tour, the commissioner said the agency had veered from its responsibility as an independent regulator, accusing it of using its authority to intimidate journalists and punish news outlets Donald Trump disapproves of.
“We’ve seen the FCC launch investigations into broadcasters because of their editorial decisions in their newsrooms,” she said at the event, organized by the media advocacy organization Free Press. “The point of all of these actions is to chill speech, to stop people from speaking out.”
Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed FCC chair, has opened investigations into PBS and NPR, ramped up the investigation into CBS for alleged “news distortion” of its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris and reinstated complaints against ABC News over the way it moderated the pre-election TV debate between Trump and Joe Biden. The FCC also opened an investigation into ABC’s parent company, NBCUniversal, and Disney, saying that the companies’ diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts may violate equal employment opportunity regulations.
“The point of all of these actions is to chill speech, to stop people from speaking out,” Gomez said, imploring the agency to “pivot away from these sham investigations” and return to its mission that initially drew her to the commission: helping broaden and improve internet and communication access for Americans.
Gomez said the pressure was having an effect. “I have broadcasters that tell me they tell the reporters to please be careful about how they report news about this administration,” she said. “That is exactly what I don’t want to hear.”
Commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate for five-year terms. Gomez, who was appointed by Biden and confirmed by the Senate in 2023, may be risking her job by speaking out against an administration that has fired independent regulators and dissenting voices across the government. But she argued that it was her job to use her platform for as long as she had it.
“I like to say that if I get fired, it isn’t because I didn’t do my job,” Gomez said. “It’s because I insisted on doing it.”
Gomez said attacks on the press and free speech were far-reaching, pointing to the shuttering of outlets like Voice of America, attacks on unions and protesters, and investigations into law firms based on who they represent. She acknowledged the widening fear of dissent in government and civil society. But, she said, there was a reason to be hopeful.
“This administration has so much power right now – and yet this censorship and control comes from a position of fear,” Gomez said, after hearing from several attendees who raised a broad set of concerns that ranged from alarm over the crackdown on protesters to the democracy-eroding damage caused by the spread of misinformation online. “Dissent should actually make us stronger as a country.”
US to ‘aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students’, Rubio says
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the US State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong,” Rubio added.
Rubio’s announcement thrilled at least one influential Trump supporter, the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who posted in response: “LET’S GO! DEPORT XI JINPING’S DAUGHTER!”
It is unclear if Loomer’s claim that the Chinese leader’s daughter, Xi Mingze, currently lives in Massachusetts is true – and given her history of spreading baseless conspiracy theories, it could well be false – but the she did graduate from Harvard in 2014.
“She had studied psychology and English and lived under an assumed name, her identity known only to a limited number of faculty and close friends—’less than ten,’ according to Kenji Minemura, a correspondent for the Asahi Shimbun, who attended the commencement and wrote about Xi’s experience in America”, Evan Osnos reported on The New Yorker’s website in 2015.
Although Xi Mingze reportedly returned to Beijing after graduation, Osnos noted that a study of foreign students by the National Science Foundation found that 92% of Chinese graduates with American PhDs still lived in the US five years after graduation. For Indians, the figure was 81%, for South Koreans 41% and for Mexicans 32%.
Justice department targets California for allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports
Donald Trump’s justice department announced on Wednesday that it is opening an investigation into allegations that the state of California, local education officials and a school district “are engaging in a pattern or practice of discrimination on the basis of sex” by allowing transgender girls to compete in high school sports.
The department said in a press release that a state law allowing transgender athletes to compete might violate Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools.
California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta; the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Tony Thurmond; the Jurupa unified school district; and the California Interscholastic Federation, which governs high school sports, were all sent letters of legal notice about the investigation.
The announcement came one day after the president, reacting to a trans athlete’s success in a high school meet, posted on his social media platform that California “continues to ILLEGALLY allow” trans girls to compete in high school tournaments.
“Please be hereby advised that large scale Federal Funding will be held back, maybe permanently, if the Executive Order on this subject matter is not adhered to,” the president added. This was not the first time that Trump had mistakenly referred to his own executive orders as if they have the force of federal law, which they do not.
The justice department does, however, have the ability to charge states with violations of laws previously passed by Congress.
“Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education,” Harmeet Dhillon, the new assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” added Dhillon, a Republican operative from California who finished second in the race to be chair of the Republican National Committee in 2023.
The department also said that it had “filed a statement of interest in federal court in support of a lawsuit filed by and on behalf of girls’ athletes to advance the appropriate interpretation of Title IX to ensure equal educational opportunities and prevent discrimination based on sex in federally funded schools and athletic programs”.
That lawsuit, on behalf of two members of a girls’ cross-country team at a Riverside high school, was filed after a 16-year-old runner, identified as TS, was dropped to the junior varsity team after a transgender athlete the same age ran 52 seconds faster than she did the first time they competed.
TS and a younger teammate, identified as KS, reportedly got in trouble with the school for protesting the inclusion of their trans classmate by wearing shirts with the phrases “Save Girls’ Sports” and “It’s Common Sense. XX ≠ XY”.
The school’s athletic department forced the students to conceal or remove the shirts, likening them to swastikas.
“Every day, my child has to go to school and see kids in shirts in stanch opposition of who she is,” the parents of the trans athlete said in a statement to Spectrum News in December, when the suit was filed. “She began to see people she thought were her friends supporting a movement that rejected her.”
Trump commutes sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader
Léonie Chao-Fong
Donald Trump has commuted the sentence of Larry Hoover, a former Chicago gang leader who had been serving multiple life sentences for more than five decades.
Hoover, 74, is the co-founder of Gangster Disciples, a gang described in court documents as “large and vicious” that sold “great quantities of cocaine, heroin, and other drugs in Chicago”.
He was convicted in 1973 for ordering the killing of a 19-year-old neighborhood drug dealer and given a sentence of 150 to 200 years.
In 1997, he was given six life sentences after being found guilty of federal drug conspiracy, extortion, money laundering and continuing to engage in a criminal enterprise.
He has been serving out his sentence at ADX Florence prison facility in Fremont county, Colorado.
The commutation, first reported by Notus, was confirmed by a White House official.
Read more:
Trump pardons Michael Grimm, Staten Island Republican who menaced reporter
Although the White House has yet to release the details, multiple reports say that Donald Trump’s pardon spree for political supporters has accelerated on Wednesday.
As first reported by NY1, the New York cable news channel, Trump has pardoned Michael Grimm, a Republican who represented Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn in Congress from 2011 to 2015.
Grimm, a former Marine and FBI agent, resigned from Congress after a tax fraud conviction.
He went on to work as a commentator on the pro-Trump cable news outlet Newsmax, and has recently dedicated his social media feed to praising Trump and his aides. “Who else thinks Stephen Miller is awesome!!? Reply with a [heart]!!” Grimm wrote on X above a portrait of Miller earlier this month.
During his stint in Congress, Grimm was perhaps best known for threatening to throw an NY1 reporter off a balcony in the Capitol after the reporter asked him to address an investigation into his campaign finances.
“Let me be clear to you. If you ever do that to me again, I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony,” he told the reporter, Michael Scotto, during the exchange, which was captured on video.
When the reporter pushed back, telling the then representative that it was a valid question, Grimm responded: “No. No. You’re not man enough. You’re not man enough. I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.”
Last year, Grimm was paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown from a horse during a polo tournament.
Trump pardons reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who were convicted of bank fraud
Donald Trump signed pardons for reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, who have been serving federal prison sentences since being convicted three years ago of bank fraud and tax evasion.
Savannah Chrisley, the couple’s daughter, posted an image on Instagram of what appeared to be Trump displaying the two signed pardons in the Oval Office.
A vocal Trump supporter, she endorsed Trump in a speech at the Republican national convention last year. Although she has called the case against her parents politically motivated, they were indicted in 2019 by BJay Pak, a US attorney nominated by Trump.
Trump’s pardons mean the couple best known for the TV series Chrisley Knows Best would be freed from federal prison. Todd Chrisley, 57, was incarcerated at a minimum-security prison camp in Pensacola, Florida. Julie Chrisley, 52, was imprisoned at a facility in Lexington, Kentucky.
In a post on X thanking the new US pardon attorney, the Republican operative Ed Martin, Savannah Chrisley wrote that her parents “are home”.
Prosecutors at the couple’s 2022 trial said the Chrisleys spent lavishly on high-priced cars, designer clothes, real estate and travel after taking out fraudulent bank loans worth millions of dollars and hiding their earnings from tax authorities.
The White House released video of Trump calling Savannah Chrisley to tell her that he was pardoning her parents on Tuesday, and saying they had been “given a pretty harsh treatment based on what I’m hearing”.
Federal judge rules effort to deport Mahmoud Khalil likely unconstitutional
A federal judge in New Jersey said on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s bid to deport Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is likely unconstitutional.
The US district judge Michael Farbiarz in Newark, New Jersey, said he will issue a further order with next steps later on Wednesday, Reuters reports. Khalil is currently in immigration detention in Louisiana.
Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called it a “mixed ruling” on Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, because the judge wrote that he “is likely to succeed on his First Amendment claim, but likely to lose on a residency application issue. For that reason, the judge denied the request for a preliminary injunction, pending further briefing on the First Amendment issue.”
Elon Musk tried to block Sam Altman’s big AI deal in the Middle East but Trump approved it anyway – WSJ
While OpenAI led a group of US tech giants who won a deal last week to build one of the world’s largest AI data centers in Abu Dhabi, behind the scenes Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup, people familiar with the matter have told the Wall Street Journal.
According to some of the people, “on a call with officials at UAE AI firm G42, Musk warned those assembled that their plan had no chance of Trump signing off on it unless Musk’s company xAI was included in the deal”, writes the WSJ.
The report goes on: “Musk had learned just before Trump’s mid-May tour of three Gulf countries that OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman was going to be on the trip and that a deal in the UAE was in the works, and grew angry about it, according to White House officials. He then said he would also join the trip, and appeared alongside Trump in Saudi Arabia.
“After Musk’s complaints, Trump and US officials reviewed the deal terms and decided to move forward. The White House officials said Musk didn’t want a deal that seemed to benefit Altman. Aides discussed how to best calm Musk down, one of the officials said, because Trump and David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto adviser, wanted to announce the deal before the end of the president’s trip to the Middle East.”
Federal judge bars Trump administration from killing New York congestion pricing program
A federal judge has blocked the US transportation department from withholding federal funding from New York as the Trump administration seeks to kill Manhattan’s congestion pricing program.
The US district judge Lewis Liman, who a day earlier issued a temporary restraining order, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from withholding approval of or funding for New York projects.
Liman said in his 109-page opinion that the transportation department had “challenged Plaintiffs to a game of chicken”, saying New York could either kill the program or “else may brace for impact and prepare to suffer the effects” of government compliance measures.
