on Wednesday. Photograph: Samuel Corum/EPA
Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to an end for the day. We will return on Thursday to resume our chronicle. In the meantime, we leave you with this summary of the day’s developments:
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to establish a White House initiative “To Promote Excellence and Innovation at Historically Black Colleges and Universities” that seemed to very closely echo the text of an executive order signed by Barack Obama in 2010, which established a White House initiative “Promoting Excellence, Innovation and Sustainability at Historically Black Colleges and Universities”.
As he signed the last in a series of executive orders on education, Trump mused aloud that by directing schools to get out of what his aide called “the whole sort of diversity, equity and inclusion cult”, the US was “getting out of that, huh, after being in that jungle for a long time”.
Trump is hosting an “intimate private dinner” for the top 220 holders of the Trump memecoin next month, the issuers of the cryptocurrency announced on Wednesday. “It’s buying influence with the president. There’s no if’s, and’s or but’s about it,” Craig Holman of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said.
A dozen states, led by the attorneys general of Oregon and Arizona, sued Donald Trump and his administration in the US court of international trade on Wednesday, calling his tariffs illegal because they were implemented under emergency powers in the absence of a true emergency.
The New England Journal of Medicine confirmed on Wednesday to the medical news site Stat that it had received a letter, asking it to account for alleged bias in its publication decisions, from Ed Martin, a Republican activist now serving as interim US attorney for the District of Columbia.
Donald Trump once again attacked Volodymyr Zelenskyy for refusing to agree to peace terms that look like a surrender to Russia. Trump claimed earlier today to be “very close to a deal” and said Zelenskyy’s stance on Crimea (not surrendering it) was “very harmful to the peace negotiations with Russia”.
A federal court accused the Trump administration of “bad faith” in the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom it deported to El Salvador despite an earlier order against it.
Law firms Perkins Coie and WilmerHale asked federal judges in Washington DC to permanently bar Trump’s executive orders against them.
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New England Journal of Medicine rejects inquiry about alleged bias from federal prosecutor who calls himself Trump's lawyer
The New England Journal of Medicine confirmed on Wednesday to the medical news site Stat that it had received a letter, asking it to account for alleged bias in its publication decisions, from Ed Martin, a Republican activist now serving as interim US attorney for the District of Columbia.
The editor of the prestigious medical journal, Eric Rubin, told Stat that the letter asked him to respond to six questions from Martin, an organizer of the 2021 Stop the Steal movement who recently referred to prosecutors in his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers”.
“As practicing physicians, our editors recognize our responsibility to doctors and patients. We use rigorous peer review and editorial processes to ensure the objectivity and reliability of the research we publish,” Rubin wrote in the reply to Martin he shared with Stat. “We support the editorial independence of medical journals and their First Amendment rights to free expression. The Journal actively fosters scholarly scientific dialogue and remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting authors, readers, and patients.”
Last week, a similar letter from Martin to another scientific journal, Chest, published by the American College of Chest Physicians, was posted online by Eric Reinhart, a psychoanalytic clinician. Reinhart reported later that at least two other journals had received similar letters from Martin.
In the letter to Chest, which was shared with the New York Times, Martin wrote: “It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates.”
He then asked the journal’s publishers to answer a series of questions, including whether they accept submissions from “competing viewpoints””; what they do if they discover they “may have misled their readers”; how they acknowledge the influence of “supporters, funders, advertisers and others”; and what role funding from the National Institutes of Health plays “in the development of submitted articles”.
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