President Donald Trump says Wednesday will be “Liberation Day” — when he plans to roll out a set of tariffs he promises will free the United States from foreign goods.
The details of Trump’s next round of import taxes are still sketchy. Most economic analyses say average U.S. families would have to absorb the cost of his tariffs in the form of higher prices and lower incomes. But an undeterred Trump is inviting CEOs to the White House to say they're investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new projects to avoid the import taxes.
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Those six sanctioned by the State Department on Monday include Hong Kong’s secretary of justice and its police commissioner.
The sanctions are over their role in the extraterritorial enforcement of a security law that’s targeted nearly 20 pro-democracy activists, including one U.S. citizen and four other U.S. residents. The U.S. government said the six sanctioned officials “have engaged in actions or policies that threaten to further erode the autonomy of Hong Kong in contravention of China’s commitments, and in connection with acts of transnational repression.”
Also sanctioned were two assistant police commissioners, the Beijing official heading the Hong Kong office on safeguarding national security, and a top Hong Kong official serving on the committee of safeguarding national security. The sanctioned officials will see their property and interests in the U.S. blocked from transactions.
The Hong Kong police in 2023 issued arrest warrants for five overseas-based activists and offered rewards of 1 million Hong Kong dollars ($128,000) for information leading to each of their arrests.
The mayor of New Jersey’s largest city filed the complaint in state court Monday saying the Trump administration and the private company GEO Group moved ahead with opening a new 1,000-bed immigration detention center without getting the proper permits.
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka said in a statement that the administration and the company failed to get construction and other permits in violation of city ordinances and state law. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced last month the opening of a detention center in Newark, saying it would be the first to open under the president’s second administration.
Baraka is one of six Democrats running for governor in New Jersey this year. Messages seeking comment were left with ICE and GEO Group.
President Trump has just started his second term, his last one permitted under the U.S. Constitution. But he’s already started talking about serving a third one.
“There are methods which you can do it,” Trump insisted to NBC News in a telephone interview Sunday.
That follows months of Trump making quips about a third term, despite the clear constitutional prohibition on it. “Am I allowed to run again?” Trump joked during a House Republican retreat in Florida in January. Just a week after he won election last fall, Trump suggested in a meeting with House Republicans that he might want to stick around after his second term was over.
Trump’s musings often spark alarm among his critics even when they’re legally impossible, given that he unsuccessfully tried to overturn his 2020 election loss and has since pardoned supporters who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
But Trump, who will be 82 when his term ends, has also repeatedly said this will be his last term. Trying for another also would flatly violate the Constitution.
▶ Read more about Trump’s comments about a third term
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said National Security Adviser Mike Waltz continues to have Trump’s confidence and that it was done discussing the embarrassing matter of senior officials communicating about plans for an airstrike against the Houthis in Yemen on a commercial messaging app.
“This case has been closed here at the White House as far as we are concerned,” Leavitt said.
Waltz added a journalist to the sensitive group chat on the platform Signal, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth divulged operational details on the strike and Vice President JD Vance discussed his reservations about the operation.
Leavitt said “there have been steps made to ensure that something like that can, obviously, not happen again,” but did not provide any clarity on what those steps were. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have called for an investigation into the sensitive conversation playing out on Signal.
He’ll be joined in the Rose Garden by his Cabinet, press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Monday.
Leavitt said Trump believes “it’s time for reciprocity” but said the details of the announcement — which have roiled the financial markets — are up to Trump to announce. She said Trump had been presented with several proposals by his advisers but the president would make a final decision and, right now, Trump wasn’t contemplating any country-wide exemptions from the tariffs.
The State Department said in a statement Monday that they were removed Sunday night and that the group included murderers and rapists.
The statement didn’t give nationalities, but the office of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said Salvadorans and Venezuelans were among the prisoners.
The men were transported to El Salvador’s maximum security prison, where they changed into the standard white T-shirts and shorts and had their heads shaved. Hundreds of migrants facing deportation were sent there earlier this month.
The Trump administration is pulling back a final round of federal pandemic aid from schools across the country, saying the money wasn’t being spent on academic recovery.
States were notified Friday that the Education Department will not disburse the remainder of the federal aid passed by Congress, although the vast majority has already been sent to schools.
The department didn’t say how much money is left of the total $189 billion approved by Congress, though officials said it’s in the billions. As of Feb. 19, the department said there was $4.4 billion left, or about 2%.
A senior department official said the money was being misused on costs including astroturf fields and “sets of bouncy glow balls.” The agency said it will consider requests for individual projects related to pandemic recovery.
Schools were supposed to spend the last of the relief by January, but the Biden administration allowed schools to request extensions.
The Council of Chief State School Officers urged the department to rethink the decision, saying schools have already spent the money for pandemic recovery efforts and were promised reimbursement.
The U.S. Institute of Peace is a congressionally created and funded think tank targeted by President Trump for closure.
Two board members of the institute have authorized replacing its temporary president with Nate Cavanaugh, the filing says. They ordered him, it says, to transfer the institute’s property to the General Services Administration, the federal government’s real estate manager, which is terminating hundreds of leases at the behest of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The court filing asks U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington to stop the action or schedule a status conference to address the issues as soon as “practicable.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The action follows a Friday night mass firing of nearly all of the institute’s 300 employees.
▶ Read more about DOGE and the U.S. Institute of Peace
President Trump’s preferred candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court and his Democratic-backed challenger made a final blitz across the state Monday, the day before voting concludes in a race where early turnout has surged and spending is nearing $100 million.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a top Trump adviser, held a rally in Green Bay on Sunday night to push for the election of Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican attorney general. He faces Susan Crawford, a Dane County judge and former attorney who fought for abortion rights and to protect union power.
Liberals currently hold a 4-3 advantage on the court, but the retirement of a liberal justice this year put the ideological balance in play. The court in battleground Wisconsin is expected to rule on abortion rights, congressional redistricting, union power and voting regulations in the coming years.
▶ Read more about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race
The White House Correspondents Association says it canceled her from performing at its annual dinner because it wants to refocus the event on journalistic excellence.
The association’s announcement over the weekend made no mention of Ruffin’s appearance on a podcast by the Daily Beast last week in which she referred to the Trump administration as “kind of a bunch of murderers.”
Ruffin, a writer for NBC’s Seth Meyers and formerly a host of a Peacock talk show, also said she wouldn’t try to make sure her jokes would target politicians of different stripes, as she was told by the correspondents’ association.
Her comments drew angry responses from the Trump administration. The president isn’t expected to attend the April event, which in past years has featured comics such as Stephen Colbert and Colin Jost. The last time a comedian did not perform at the dinner was in 2019, when historian Ron Chernow spoke.
▶ Read more about Amber Ruffin and the White House correspondents’ dinner
Tocorón once had it all. A nightclub, swimming pools, tigers, a lavish suite and plenty of food. This wasn’t a Las Vegas-style resort, but it felt like it for some of the thousands who until recently lived in luxury in this sprawling prison in northern Venezuela.
Here, between parties, concerts and weeks-long visits from wives and children, is the birthplace of the Tren de Aragua, a dangerous gang that has gained global notoriety after Trump put it at the center of his anti-immigrant narrative.
But kidnappings, extorsion and other crimes were planned, ordered or committed from this prison long before Trump’s rhetoric.
The tiny, impoverished town where the Aragua Penitentiary Center is used to bustle with residents selling food, renting phone chargers and storing bags for prison visitors. Now, the prison is back under government control, and streets in the town, also called Tocorón, are mostly deserted.
▶ Read more about the Tren de Aragua gang
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday instructed the Justice Department to dismiss the lawsuit. Georgia Republican lawmakers passed the sweeping election overhaul in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.
The lawsuit, filed in June 2021 under former President Joe Biden, alleged the Georgia law was intended to deny Black voters equal access to the ballot. Bondi said the Biden administration was pushing “false claims of suppression.”
“Georgians deserve secure elections, not fabricated claims of false voter suppression meant to divide us,” she said.
The law was part of a trend of Republican-backed measures that tightened rules around voting, passed in the months after Trump lost his reelection bid to Biden, claiming without evidence that voter fraud cost him victory.
▶ Read more about Georgia’s election law
The letter — released Monday — was penned by a group from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which was created in 1863 to provide expert guidance to the government.
Up to 19 Nobel laureates signed Monday’s letter, which described how the administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories and hampering international scientific collaboration. Those moves will increasingly put the United States at a disadvantage against other countries, the letter predicted.
The signees said they’re speaking up for colleagues who “have kept silent to avoid antagonizing the administration and jeopardizing their funding.”
On the campaign trail, Trump used contentiousness around transgender people’s access to sports and bathrooms to fire up conservative voters and sway undecideds. And in his first months back in office, Trump has pushed the issue further, erasing mention of transgender people on government websites and passports and trying to remove them from the military.
For transgender people and their allies — along with several judges who’ve ruled against Trump in response to legal challenges — it’s a matter of civil rights for a small group. But many Americans believe those rights had grown too expansive.
Trump’s spotlight is giving Monday’s Transgender Day of Visibility a different tenor this year.
“What he wants is to scare us into being invisible again,” said Rachel Crandall Crocker, the executive director of Transgender Michigan who organized the first Day of Visibility 16 years ago. “We have to show him we won’t go back.”
▶ Read more about Transgender Day of Visibility
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 was down 1.3% following one of its worst losses of the past couple of years Friday. It’s on track to finish the first three months of the year with a loss of 6.4%, which would make this its worst quarter in nearly three years.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 295 points, or 0.7%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 2.3% lower.
The U.S. stock market’s drops followed a sell-off that spanned the world earlier Monday as worries build that tariffs coming Wednesday from Trump will worsen inflation and grind down growth for economies. Trump has said he’s plowing ahead in part because he wants more manufacturing jobs back in the United States.
In Japan, the Nikkei 225 index dropped 4%. South Korea’s Kospi sank 3%, and France’s CAC 40 fell 1.5%.
▶ Read more about the financial markets
Calls from the U.S. to Roustan Hockey headquarters in Canada in recent weeks have been anything but routine, as bulk orders of name-brand sticks have suddenly become complicated conversations.
“These customers want to know: When their orders ship, will they have to pay an additional 25% tariff? And we respond by saying, ’Well, right now we don’t know, so they postpone their order or cancel their order because they want to know before they order what the cost is going to be,” said Graeme Roustan, who owns the company that makes and sells more than 100,000 hockey sticks annually to the U.S. market.
The prospect of 25% tariffs by Trump on Canadian imports, currently paused for some goods but facing full implementation Wednesday, has caused headaches if not havoc throughout the commercial ecosystem. The sports equipment industry is certainly no exception, with so many of the products manufactured for sports -loving Americans outside the U.S.
▶ Read more about the effects of possible tariffs on the price of sporting goods
U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from Trump.
The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card and citizenship applicants – and not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.
▶ Read more about what the new proposal means and how it might expand social media surveillance
Elon Musk gave out $1 million checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group, ahead of a Wisconsin Supreme Court election that the tech billionaire cast as critical to President Donald Trump’s agenda and “the future of civilization.”
Musk and groups he supports have spent more than $20 million to help conservative favorite Brad Schimel in Tuesday’s race, which will determine the ideological makeup of a court likely to decide key issues in a perennial battleground state.
A unanimous state Supreme Court on Sunday refused to hear a last-minute attempt by the state’s Democratic attorney general to stop Musk from handing over the checks to two voters, a ruling that came just minutes before the planned start of the rally.
Two lower courts had already rejected the legal challenge by Democrat Josh Kaul, who argues that Musk’s offer violates a state law.
▶ Read more about Musk in Wisconsin
The group of Democrats, most of whom serve as their state’s top election official, is telling Congress the legislative proposal to add a proof of citizenship requirement when registering to vote could disenfranchise voters and upend election administration.
On Monday, the House Rules Committee is expected to consider the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, known as the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. The letter signed by 15 secretaries of state was sent Friday.
Voting by noncitizens is rare, but Republicans say any instances undermine public confidence. Last week, President Trump directed, among other things, an update to the federal voter registration form to require proof of citizenship. Legal challenges are expected.
In the letter, Democrats say it’s the “job of election officials to verify the eligibility of citizens to cast a ballot, not the job of citizens to convince the government that they are eligible to exercise their right to vote.”
Trump says Wednesday will be “Liberation Day” — a moment when he plans to roll out a set of tariffs that he promises will free the United States from foreign goods.
The details of Trump’s next round of import taxes are still sketchy. Most economic analyses say average U.S. families would have to absorb the cost of his tariffs in the form of higher prices and lower incomes. But an undeterred Trump is inviting CEOs to the White House to say they are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new projects to avoid the import taxes.
It is also possible that the tariffs are short-lived if Trump feels he can cut a deal after imposing them.
“I’m certainly open to it, if we can do something,” Trump told reporters. “We’ll get something for it.”
At stake are family budgets, America’s prominence as the world’s leading financial power and the structure of the global economy.
▶ Read more about what you should know regarding the impending trade penalties
Trump will sign executive orders twice today, first at 1 p.m. ET and again at 5:30 p.m. ET, according to the White House.
Immigration remains a strength for Trump, but his handling of tariffs is getting more negative feedback, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
About half of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s approach to immigration, the survey shows, but only about 4 in 10 have a positive view of the way he’s handling the economy and trade negotiations.
The poll indicates that many Americans are still on board with Trump’s efforts to ramp up deportations and restrict immigration. But it also suggests that his threats to impose tariffs might be erasing his advantage on another issue that he made central to his winning 2024 campaign.
Views of Trump’s job performance overall are more negative than positive, the survey found. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, and more than half disapprove.
▶ Read more about the findings from the poll
Trump said Sunday that “I’m not joking” about trying to serve a third term, the clearest indication he is considering ways to breach a constitutional barrier against continuing to lead the country after his second term ends at the beginning of 2029.
“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC News from Mar-a-Lago, his private club.
He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington that “I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged.” Trump lost that election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Still, Trump added: “I don’t want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, we’ve got a long time to go.”
▶ Read more about Trump’s comments on a third term
President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he walks on the South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, Sunday, March 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
President Donald Trump walks down the stairs of Air Force One upon his arrival at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Sunday, March 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez)
