Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back at it early on Tuesday. In the meantime, here are some of the day’s main developments:
The supreme court cleared the way for the Trump administration to fire 1,400 Department of Education employees, as it continues to dismantle the agency.
Supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that allowing the education department to be gutted “will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended”.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, thanked Donald Trump for saying that European nations, led by Germany and Norway, could purchase US-made Patriot missile air-defense systems on Ukraine’s behalf, to help defend the country against aerial bombardment by Russia.
Donald Trump sowed widespread confusion when said that the US “would be doing very severe tariffs if we don’t have a deal in 50 days” to halt Russia’s war on Ukraiune. “Tariffs at about 100%,” Trump added, “you’d call them secondary tariffs, you know what that means.” No one knew what that meant.
A coalition of mostly Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit today challenging a move by Trump’s administration to withhold about $6.8bn in congressionally approved federal funding for K-12 schools.
Trump continued his attacks on Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, calling the central banker a “stupid guy” and a “knucklehead” as the president called for interest rates to be lowered to 1% or less.
As Trump faced blowback from supporters over his administration’s decision to not release more information about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, more attention was being paid to the president’s evasive answer on the subject during a portion of an interview with Fox News last year that was not broadcast.
Updated
Ro Khanna a California congressman, said in a speech on the House floor on Monday that he had introduced an amendment to demand the full release of the Epstein files. He called on the speaker’s rules committee to put the matter to a vote “tomorrow”.
“This is a question of whose side are you on. Are you on the side of protecting the rich and powerful,” Khanna said. “Or are you on the side of the people?”
Updated
