Trump says all Canada trade talks ‘terminated’ over ad criticising tariffs
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I am Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that president Donald Trump said on Thursday all trade talks with Canada were terminated following what he called a fraudulent advertisement from Canada in which former and late US president Ronald Reagan spoke negatively about tariffs.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The Thursday night post on Trump’s social media site came after Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said he aims to double his country’s exports to countries outside the US because of the threat posed by Trump’s tariffs.
Trump posted: “The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is fake, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.”
The president wrote: “They only did this to interfere with the decision of the US supreme court, and other courts”. He added: “Tariffs are very important to the national security, and economy, of the USA. Based on their egregious behaviour, all trade negotiations with Canada are hereby terminated.”
Carney’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night. The prime minister was set to leave on Friday morning for a summit in Asia, while Trump is set to do the same on Friday evening.
Earlier on Thursday, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation + Institute posted on X that the ad created by the government of Ontario “misrepresents the ‘Presidential Radio Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade’ dated April 25, 1987.” It added that Ontario did not receive foundation permission “to use and edit the remarks”.
The foundation said it is “reviewing legal options in this matter” and invited the public to watch the unedited video of Reagan’s address.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
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The federal government remains shut down.
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Donald Trump canceled plans for a federal deployment to San Francisco at the request of two billionaire supporters, but he reiterated threats to Chicago.
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Trump said that he does not plan to ask Congress to declare war on Venezuela, ahead of possible strikes targeting suspected drug cartels as “we’re just gonna kill people”.
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Trump said an unnamed “friend” had just sent him “a check for $130m” to be used to pay military salaries during the government shutdown.
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A federal judge in Texas on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Republican congressman who argued that California’s redistricting proposal would cause him personal injury and should be blocked.
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Trump claimed his militarized war on drugs was a huge improvement over the Biden administration’s effort, but a government database shows drug seizures are down from 2022.
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The White House has revealed that major companies in the tech, defense and crypto industries are helping Trump fund his $300m ballroom at the White House, where work is under way to demolish the entire East Wing.
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Top House Democrats have accused Donald Trump of orchestrating an illegal scheme to pay himself $230m in taxpayer money, demanding he immediately abandon claims they say violate the constitution.
Key events
Joseph Gedeon
Top House Democrats have accused Donald Trump of orchestrating an illegal scheme to pay himself $230m in taxpayer money, demanding he immediately abandon claims they say violate the constitution.
The representative Jamie Raskin, ranking member on the House judiciary committee, and the representative Robert Garcia, ranking member of the oversight committee, sent a letter to the president on Thursday condemning his plan to use a confidential administrative process to direct treasury funds into his own pocket.
“Your plan to have your obedient underlings at the Department of Justice instruct the US Treasury to pay you, personally, hundreds of millions of dollars – especially at a time when most Americans are struggling to pay rent, put food on the table, and afford health care – is an outrageous and shocking attempt to shake down the American people,” the lawmakers wrote.
The letter also comes as Democracy Forward, a leading legal advocacy group, filed a public records request on Wednesday seeking documents related to Trump’s claims for restitution over those same earlier Department of Justice cases against him.
While in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump insisted to reporters that the government owes him “a lot of money” for past justice department investigations, including the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search and the probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The president claimed personal authority over the decision, saying: “It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?”
This week, Raskin said his staff’s analysis suggests that Trump could receive the money without immediately disclosing it.
“Our reading is that, even though this is a private settlement, it doesn’t have to be disclosed anywhere until there is an accounting of where all the money has gone at the end of the year,” Raskin said in an interview with the New Republic.
David Smith
Donald Trump picked Kristi Noem as homeland security secretary as a personal favour to his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski despite objections that she was “obviously unqualified”, according to a new book.
The factional infighting behind Trump’s cabinet selection, where inexperience was no barrier to success, is detailed by journalist Jonathan Karl in Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Soon after his election victory last November, the book recounts, Trump picked Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security, central to fulfilling his campaign promise of the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
Like Pete Hegseth, who landed the job of defense secretary, Noem, then the governor of South Dakota – who faced an outcry over her admission in a book that she once shot a pet dog – had not been on the transition team’s list of possible candidates and had not gone through vetting for the job, Karl writes in Retribution.
“When a surprised Trump advisor asked the president-elect why he had decided to nominate Noem to be secretary of Homeland Security, he had a simple answer. ‘I did it for Corey,’ he said. ‘It’s the only thing Corey asked me for.’”
Lewandowski was Trump’s campaign manager until he was fired in June 2016 after a string of controversies that included being accused of forcibly yanking the arm of a female reporter. Rumours of an affair between Lewandowski and Noem have swirled in Washington for years, though both deny the relationship.
Karl notes that even some of Trump’s closest allies were uncomfortable with putting Noem in charge of a sprawling department that includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
Lauren Aratani
The White House has revealed that major companies in the tech, defense and crypto industries are helping Donald Trump fund his $300m ballroom at the White House, where work is under way to demolish the entire East Wing.
The list of donors includes tech companies Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google; the defense contractors Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Palantir; and the communication companies T-Mobile and Comcast, according to CNN.
Billionaire Trump supporters who were major donors to his campaign last year are also featured on the list, including Miriam Adelson, the widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; the Blackstone CEO, Stephen Schwarzman; the oil tycoon Harold Hamm; and the cryptocurrency billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary and former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is also on the list.
Some donors last week were invited to a White House dinner celebrating their contribution to the ballroom project, including representatives from Google, Amazon and Lockheed Martin.
“Chief executives throughout history have contributed to making the White House special, and nothing of this magnitude has been done,” Trump told the donors at the start of the dinner, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said the ballroom “is being paid for 100% by me and some friends of mine”. While the president initially said the 90,000 sq ft ballroom would cost $200m, he upped the figure to $300m on Wednesday.
Trump backs down on sending federal troops to San Francisco for immigration crackdown
Maanvi Singh
Donald Trump canceled plans for a deployment of federal troops to San Francisco that had sparked widespread condemnation from California leaders and sent protesters flooding into the streets.
The Bay Area region had been on edge after reports emerged on Wednesday that the Trump administration was poised to send more than 100 Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agents to the US Coast Guard base in Alameda, a city in the East Bay, as part of a large-scale immigration-enforcement plan. By early Thursday morning, hundreds of protesters had gathered outside the Coast Guard base, holding signs with slogans such as “No ICE or Troops in the Bay!”.
But just hours later, the president said he would not move forward with a “surge” of federal forces in the area after speaking with the mayor, Daniel Lurie, and Silicon Valley leaders including Marc Benioff, the Salesforce CEO who recently apologized for saying Trump should send national guard troops, and Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia.
Lurie said he spoke with the president on Wednesday night, and that Trump told him he would call off the deployment.
“In that conversation, the president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning,” Lurie said in a statement.
Trump confirmed the conversation on his Truth Social platform, saying: “I spoke to Mayor Lurie last night and he asked, very nicely, that I give him a chance to see if he can turn it around.”
Trump says all Canada trade talks ‘terminated’ over ad criticising tariffs
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I am Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with the news that president Donald Trump said on Thursday all trade talks with Canada were terminated following what he called a fraudulent advertisement from Canada in which former and late US president Ronald Reagan spoke negatively about tariffs.
“Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The Thursday night post on Trump’s social media site came after Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said he aims to double his country’s exports to countries outside the US because of the threat posed by Trump’s tariffs.
Trump posted: “The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is fake, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.”
The president wrote: “They only did this to interfere with the decision of the US supreme court, and other courts”. He added: “Tariffs are very important to the national security, and economy, of the USA. Based on their egregious behaviour, all trade negotiations with Canada are hereby terminated.”
Carney’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night. The prime minister was set to leave on Friday morning for a summit in Asia, while Trump is set to do the same on Friday evening.
Earlier on Thursday, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation + Institute posted on X that the ad created by the government of Ontario “misrepresents the ‘Presidential Radio Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade’ dated April 25, 1987.” It added that Ontario did not receive foundation permission “to use and edit the remarks”.
The foundation said it is “reviewing legal options in this matter” and invited the public to watch the unedited video of Reagan’s address.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
-
The federal government remains shut down.
-
Donald Trump canceled plans for a federal deployment to San Francisco at the request of two billionaire supporters, but he reiterated threats to Chicago.
-
Trump said that he does not plan to ask Congress to declare war on Venezuela, ahead of possible strikes targeting suspected drug cartels as “we’re just gonna kill people”.
-
Trump said an unnamed “friend” had just sent him “a check for $130m” to be used to pay military salaries during the government shutdown.
-
A federal judge in Texas on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Republican congressman who argued that California’s redistricting proposal would cause him personal injury and should be blocked.
-
Trump claimed his militarized war on drugs was a huge improvement over the Biden administration’s effort, but a government database shows drug seizures are down from 2022.
-
The White House has revealed that major companies in the tech, defense and crypto industries are helping Trump fund his $300m ballroom at the White House, where work is under way to demolish the entire East Wing.
-
Top House Democrats have accused Donald Trump of orchestrating an illegal scheme to pay himself $230m in taxpayer money, demanding he immediately abandon claims they say violate the constitution.
