Summary
Closing Summary
Our live coverage is ending now. In the meantime, you can find all of our live US politics coverage here. And you can also follow along with our continuing coverage of the United States’s tariffs announcment here. Here is a summary of the key developments from today:
The New York stock exchange closed on its worst day of trading since June 2020 – during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The main indices saw their worst one-day falls in five years as Donald Trump claimed that “the markets are going to boom” in response to his sweeping tariffs. As Friday morning dawned in Asia, markets opened lower there as well.
The 500 richest people in the world lost a combined $208bn today as stock markets plunged, Bloomberg reports. US billionaires – and Trump allies – like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos were the most affected.
Prominent Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, criticized Trump’s tariff announcement. McConnell, the Kentucky Republican senator and former Senate majority leader, said they are “bad policy and trade wars with our partners hurt working people most”. While Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, says he is “not a fan of tariffs” and that he hopes Trump’s are “short-lived”.
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr says some personnel let go from and programs shuttered at the Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday will be reinstated. The announcement came the same day that a federal judge said she will temporarily block the Trump administration from cutting $11bn in federal public health funding.
A coalition of 19 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that a recent executive order signed by the president seeking to overhaul the nation’s elections was unconstitutional. The attorneys general are asking a judge to declare the provisions “unconstitutional and void”.
The Pentagon’s inspector general’s office announced it was opening an investigation into defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of an unclassified commercial texting application to coordinate strikes on Yemen’s Houthis. Hegseth outlined details of a US airstrike in Yemen in a Signal group chat that included the vice-president, JD Vance, as well as Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, to the chat.
Several members of Donald Trump’s embattled national security council have been fired, Axios reports. The firings come a day after conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office and pressed Trump to fire specific NSC staffers for disloyalty.
Updated
Australia dodged the worst of Donald Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs yesterday, when the president imposed only the base 10% tariff on the country. But Trump did criticize Australia by name during his speech for not importing more American beef.
Calla Wahlquist in Australia has more on the US-Australia meat trade war:
Australia introduced a ban on US beef imports in 2003, in response to an outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or mad cow disease.
It was technically lifted in 2019, subject to an ongoing biosecurity review that in practice means no imports of fresh beef. The sticking point is the US’s reliance on live cattle imports from Canada and Mexico to bolster its national herd.
Read on below for more:
