Closing summary
This brings us to an end of our live coverage of another day in the life of the second Trump administration. We will be back on Thursday, but in the meantime, here is an overview of the day’s events:
Donald Trump, citing legally dubious national security provision, imposed 25% tariffs on cars and car parts made outside the United States, effective on 2 April.
Canada’s leader, Mark Carney, called Trump’s new auto tariffs “a direct attack” on Canadian autoworkers and pledged to “defend our workers”.
Trump suggested that he might give China “a little reduction in tariffs” if the country approves a deal to sell the US arm of TikTok to an American company.
Ireland braced for a hit to its economy after Trump mentioned that tariffs on Irish pharmaceuticals would be coming soon.
As some Republican lawmakers joined Democrats in calling for accountability over top administration officials using an insecure Signal group chat to discuss military attacks on Yemen, Trump tried to dismiss calls for an inquiry as “a witch hunt”, a strategy which has, previously, worked out for him.
A review of the travel schedule for Michael Waltz, the national security adviser who created the Signal group chat, shows that he was in Saudi Arabia on the day that he accidentally invited the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to connect on Signal. If Waltz was on his personal phone when he did that, as seems likely, experts have pointed out that foreign spies could have compromised his device and followed the Signal chat in real time.
Democrats called on defense secretary Pete Hegseth to resign following the Signal group chat scandal.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the accidental inclusion of the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief in the Signal group chat was a “big mistake” but said that that “none of the information on there at any point threatened the operation or the lives of our service members.” That seems to be contradicted by a giant image of the texts from Hegseth, the defense secretary, who had described the exact timing of attacks, and weapons systems involved, two hours before they took place.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Elon Musk’s team is investigating how the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was added to the group chat.
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The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) published its environmental assessment of an Australian company’s proposed lithium mining project in south-eastern Oregon on Wednesday, and is giving the public just four days to read the 103-page assessment and submit comments.
As Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, the Trump administration appears to be fast-tracking the proposed mine, in keeping with executive orders signed by the president calling on federal agencies like the Department of the Interior, which manages the BLM, to speed up reviews of extraction projects like mining, drilling and logging.
According to OPB: “The agency’s assessment outlines the full scope of Jindalee Resources’ plans to search the area for lithium, a highly valuable metal used in batteries. Under its subsidiary, HiTech Minerals, Jindalee aims to bore up to 800 feet into the earth across 7,200 acres in Malheur County, near the Oregon-Nevada border.”
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