Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are some of the day’s top developments:
A federal judge in Boston blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, mere hours after the university sued the DHS.
Trump said that a 25% tariff he said he will impose on Apple will also apply to Samsung and other smartphone makers who don’t make their products in the United States. “When they build their plant here, there’s no tariffs,” he said.
Trump said he’s not looking for a trade deal with the EU – which he announced earlier today will be slapped with 50% tariffs from 1 June – but said he’d be open to talking about a delay if companies were willing to build their plants in the US.
The US department of defense announced that it has a new press secretary, Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory promoted by neo-Nazis.
Paul Weiss, the law firm that agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support Donald Trump’s administration after he targeted it in an executive order in March, lost four senior litigators on Friday.
The US departments of state and treasury acted on Friday to lift sanctions on Syria, following Donald Trump’s meeting with the new Syrian leader, the former Islamist rebel Ahmad al-Sharaa, last week in Saudi Arabia.
A US judge on Friday overturned a Trump executive order targeting Jenner & Block, a big law firm that employed Andrew Weissmann, who helped lead special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Russian government’s effort to help elect Donald Trump.
A Pentagon social media account dedicated to 'Fighting Against Fake News' misleads followers
One of the stranger aspects of Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is the creation of a social media account, DOD Rapid Response, dedicated, it says, to supporting the defense secretary’s work and “Fighting Against Fake News”.
The account, which was run until Friday by the right-wing podcaster Graham Allen, who stepped down after spending much of his time arguing with reporters on X, has been used for nakedly political posts, to boost Trump administration officials and attack critics.
On Friday, for instance, the account lavished praise on the vice-president, JD Vance, for what it suggested was an incredible feat of physical stamina: shaking the hands of all of this year’s graduates of the naval academy.
“It’s nice to have a Leader like @vp who can stand for hours just to honor the accomplishments of our newest officers. He literally is shaking every single hand” the account posted along with 54 seconds of video of Vance at the naval academy graduation ceremony.
While it is indeed true that Vance stood on stage at Annapolis on Friday and shook the hands of graduates for an hour and seven minutes straight, the feat is hardly unusual. The previous vice-president, Kamala Harris, did exactly the same in 2021, for an hour and 19 minutes. And in 2015, in Joe Biden’s final year as vice-president, he did the same for an hour and eighteen minutes.
