Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:
Federal prosecutors reportedly tried, and failed, to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday over a social media video they recorded to remind service members in the military and intelligence community that they are not required to follow illegal orders.
Donald Trump’s sudden turn against a new, publicly owned bridge being constructed to connect Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario came right after a Republican donor who owns a private, rival bridge met with Trump’s commerce secretary, the New York Times reports.
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, and the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, have taken on the daunting task of trying to explain to Trump that the reasons he cited for threatening to block the opening of a new bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan are entirely untrue.
In an appearance on the rightwing channel Real America’s Voice, a Republican congressman from Missouri, Mark Alford, said “we are still investigating” the lyrics of a song performed in Spanish by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny during his Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday.
As the US supreme court prepares to rule on whether Trump does have the power to impose tariffs on foreign imports, to address a self-declared economic emergency, the president confirmed in an interview that he sets tariff rates based, in part, on his own feelings about the leaders of other nations.
Trump supporters struggle to reframe damning evidence Trump knew of Epstein's crimes
Trump supporters have been scrambling to put a positive spin on the news that, as the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown first reported on Monday, a former Palm Beach police chief told the FBI in 2019 that Donald Trump called him in July 2006, when Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest for sex crimes was in the newspapers, to say: “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this”.
Although that statement directly contradict the president’s claim in 2019 that he “had no idea” about Epstein’s crimes, Trump supporters, including the new hosts of the Charlie Kirk podcast, claimed on Tuesday that it meant Trump had been something like a whistleblower.
This led an exasperated Brown, whose reporting for the Herald in 2017 and 2018 led to the federal prosecutions of Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to explain on social media: “To make clear: when Trump called the chief, it was after the Epstein story became public — when Epstein was arrested. Palm beach police had been investigating the case since 2005.”
The retired Palm Beach police chief, Michael Reiter confirmed to Brown that a partially redacted document in the Epstein files posted online by the justice department was an account of a 2019 FBI interview with him in which he described the call from Trump.
As Trump’s fans struggled to smooth out the contradictions in his ever-shifting story about what he knew when of the sex crimes carried out by the man he socialized with for most of two decades, they also had to confront the fact that Trump told the police chief in 2006 that Maxwell was “evil”, but then said in 2020, after Maxwell’s arrest, when asked at a news conference if he expected her “to turn in powerful men”, “I just wish her well”.
