Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to an end on a day when the president veered sharply from just increasing tariffs on trading partners to suddenly demanding major political concessions from Brazil’s president. We will resume our chronicle on Thursday. Here are the day’s key developments:
Donald Trump released an intemperate letter to Brazil’s president imposing a 50% tariff and complaining about the prosecution of his friend, former president Jair Bolsonaro, for the crime of simply trying to stay in office despite losing an election and then inciting a riot by his supporters to derail the transfer of power.
Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rejected Trump’s demand that the charges against Bolsonaro be dropped, and pointed out that Brazil has an independent judiciary and does not, in fact, have a trade imbalance with the US.
Brazilians mocked Bolsonaro’s potential successor for supporting Trump, by remixing video of him in a MAGA hat on social media.
Amid concerns that a wave of staff reductions threaten the core missions of Nasa, Trump announced that he is asking the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, to also serve as interim administrator of the space agency.
Trump complimented the president of Liberia on his excellent English, revealing that he is unaware of that nation’s close ties to the United States, as a home for freed slaves.
The US supreme court maintained a judicial block on a Republican-crafted Florida law that makes it a crime for undocumented immigrants to enter the state.
Bolsonaro's son thanks Trump on social media, asks for sanctions against Brazilian offiicals
In a series of social media posts, Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, thanked Donald Trump for imposing a punitive 50% tariff on Brazilian exports to the United States in part because of the prosecution of the former president for allegedly plotting a coup to stay in power after losing his the 2022 election.
“THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP - MAKE BRAZIL FREE AGAIN” Eduardo Bolsonaro wrote in a post on X, in which he also appealed for the imposition of sanctions on government officials in Brazil for supposedly violating his father’s human rights. “WE WANT MAGNISTKY!” he added, in reference to the US law known as the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.
