US commerce secretary says Canada’s ‘socialist regime’ has been ‘feeding off of America’
One day before the newly elected Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, visits the White House to meet Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, accused Canada of being a “socialist regime” that has been “feeding off of America” for decades.
Lutnick made his undiplomatic remarks to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, who served as Trump’s top economic advisor during his first term when the president took pride in negotiating the USMCA trade pact with Mexico and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But when Kudlow asked Lutnick about the prospects for a new US trade deal with Canada, the commerce secretary scoffed at the idea. “Why do we make cars in Canada?” he asked. “Why do we do our films in Canada? Come on!”
Key events
Melania Trump to host unveiling of stamp honoring Barbara Bush, who hated Donald Trump for decades
On Thursday at the White House, Melania Trump will host the unveiling of a US Postal Service stamp honoring the former first lady Barbara Bush, who made no secret of her passionate hatred of Donald Trump.
In a diary entry written in 1990 that Bush gave to the journalist Susan Page for a biography, the then first lady wrote that Trump’s behavior had transformed the meaning of his name into a new word. “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly,” Bush wrote.
The same year, Bush was astounded to read in a news report that Trump, in remarks at a charity dinner attended by the former president, Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy, had mocked Reagan for paid speeches he had delivered in Japan. “I see President and Mrs= Reagan in the audience,” Trump said. “Did you have to pay them $2m?”
In 2016, just before her son Jeb dropped out of the Republican presidential primary against Trump, the former first lady told CBS News: “I don’t know how women can vote for someone who said what he sad about Megyn Kelly. It was terrible, and we knew what he meant too.”
After Kelly had asked Trump to account for his past misogynistic and sexist comments during a primary debate hosted by Fox in that campaign, Trump was enraged, and later told CNN: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her … wherever.”
“He’s like a comedian, or like a showman or something,” the former first lady, whose stamp will be unveiled by the current one, said in the same interview.
Page later revealed that Trump’s first presidency shook Bush’s faith in the Republican party. Asked shortly before she died whether she still considered herself a Republican, Bush answered: “I’d probably say no today.”
Until the day she died in 2018, Bush kept a red, white and blue digital clock on her bedside table that counted down to the end of Trump’s term.
Donald Trump elected not to attend the former first lady’s funeral, although Melania Trump was there, alongside the former first ladies Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton.
Trumps signs order barring federal funding for gain-of-function research in China
Donald Trump just signed an executive order ending all federal funding for what the White House calls “dangerous gain-of-function research in countries of concern like China and Iran and in foreign nations deemed to have insufficient research oversight.”
In the made-for-television photo-op in the Oval Office, Trump was flanked by his new health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and Dr Marty Makary, the FDA commissioner, and Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director.
Trump alluded to the claim that has become an article of faith among his supporters: that research financed by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China years before the Covid-19 pandemic, which some experts described as gain-of-function, could have led to the development of Sars-CoV-2, the deadly coronavirus that causes the disease Covid-19, in the Wuhan lab.
In 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci rejected Senator Rand Paul’s claim at a contentious Senate hearing that research carried out in Wuhan before 2017 with some support from the NIAID met the definition of gain-of-function and pointedly explained that it was “molecularly impossible” to make Sars-CoV-2 from the viruses that were used in those experiments.
Fauci did not get a chance to explain during that hearing what the scientific basis was for the determination by NIAID biologists that the experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, described in a paper published in 2017, were not subject to a temporary pause on the funding of gain-of-function research imposed during the Obama administration in 2014, which was lifted in 2017 when Trump was president.
The official White House account that shared video of the order signing on social media also said that the measure was to guard against what it called “lab accidents and other biosecurity incidents, such as those that likely caused Covid-19”.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, suggested last week that the Trump administration’s insistence that the Covid-19 pandemic started in a lab was intended to justify sweeping cuts to all biomedical and public health research. “No evidence supports a lab leak, but it’s used to justify a 40% budget cut anyway,” Rasmussen wrote.
The White House has taken down some government websites providing Covid-19 information and replaced them with a new boldly styled page dedicated to the controversial theory that the pandemic was caused by the virus leaking from a Chinese government laboratory.
Last month, the Trump administration took down the federal government websites covid.gov and covidtests.gov, which had provided basic information about Covid-19 vaccines, treatment and testing, and replaced them with a new White House page that showed Trump in front of the words “LAB LEAK” in giant letters. A headline below reads: “The True Origins of Covid-19.”
US commerce secretary says Canada’s ‘socialist regime’ has been ‘feeding off of America’
One day before the newly elected Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, visits the White House to meet Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, accused Canada of being a “socialist regime” that has been “feeding off of America” for decades.
Lutnick made his undiplomatic remarks to Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, who served as Trump’s top economic advisor during his first term when the president took pride in negotiating the USMCA trade pact with Mexico and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement.
But when Kudlow asked Lutnick about the prospects for a new US trade deal with Canada, the commerce secretary scoffed at the idea. “Why do we make cars in Canada?” he asked. “Why do we do our films in Canada? Come on!”
Tom Perkins
Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, announced on Monday that she was dropping all charges against seven pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested last May at a University of Michigan encampment.
The announcement came just moments before the judge was to decide on a defense motion to disqualify Nessel’s office over alleged bias. Defense attorney Amir Makled said the motion largely stemmed from an October Guardian report detailing Nessel’s extensive personal, financial and political connections to university regents calling for the activists to be prosecuted.
“This was a case of selective prosecution and rooted in bias, not in public safety issues,” Makled added. “We’re hoping this sends a message to other institutions locally and nationally that protest is not a crime, and dissent is not disorder.”
Read more:
Editorial cartoonist who quit Washington Post over sketch of Bezos kneeling to Trump wins Pulitzer
This year’s Pulitzer prize for illustrated reporting and commentary was awarded to editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit the Washington Post in January to protest the newspaper’s refusal to publish her satirical cartoon depicting the outlet’s owner, Jeff Bezos – and a group of other media and technology barons – kneeling before Donald Trump and offering him bags of cash.
Last week, after the Guardian reported that Trump called Bezos to complain about report that Amazon planned to list tariff costs on site, and Amazon relented to the pressure, Telnaes posted her rejected cartoon again on Bluesky.
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In its citation, the Pulitzer board praised Telnaes “For delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity – and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
After she quit, Telnaes wrote on Substack:
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
‘It is really scary’: Trump cuts will lead to more deaths in disasters, expert warns
Nina Lakhani
The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to disaster management will cost lives in the US, with hollowed-out agencies unable to accurately predict, prepare for or respond to extreme weather events, earthquakes and pandemics, a leading expert has warned.
Samantha Montano, professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and author of Disasterology: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the Climate Crisis, said the death toll from disasters including hurricanes, tornadoes and water pollution will rise in the US unless Trump backtracks on mass layoffs and funding cuts to key agencies. That includes the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), whose work relies heavily on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which is also being dismantled.
“The overall risk of threats and hazards occurring in the US has increased since this administration took over, while the capacity of our emergency management system is being diminished,” said Montano in an interview.
Emergency managers will be operating blindly without the data that we have become accustomed to from Noaa and other science agencies. It’s what we rely on to issue warnings and evacuation orders, and pre-position resources. It is really scary because we used to not have good weather data – and death tolls were remarkably higher.
It is difficult to know if it will be the next hurricane where the response completely fails or three hurricanes from now. But I feel confident in saying that if the cuts continue, we will be seeing higher death tolls and more devastation, absolutely. It’s beyond crazy that we are eliminating the funding for these agencies particularly at this moment where hazards are increasing because of climate change.
Chris Stein
Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp has ruled out running for Senate next year against Jon Ossoff, one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the chamber.
Kemp was viewed as a strong candidate to flip the seat that Ossoff won in 2020, given his overwhelming re-election victory as governor of the swing state three years ago. Several Republicans are said to be considering running for the Senate seat, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, the rightwing north Georgia congresswoman who is one of Donald Trump’s most ardent defenders.
“Over the last few weeks, I have had many conversations with friends, supporters, and leaders across the country who encouraged me to run for the US Senate in 2026. I greatly appreciate their support and prayers for our family. After those discussions, I have decided that being on the ballot next year is not the right decision for me and my family,” Kemp wrote on X.
“I spoke with President Trump and Senate leadership earlier today and expressed my commitment to work alongside them to ensure we have a strong Republican nominee who can win next November, and ultimately be a conservative voice in the US Senate who will put hardworking Georgians first.”
Ossoff was first elected the same year that Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia’s electoral votes in nearly three decades. But last year, Georgia voters picked Trump, and Ossoff is expected to face a competitive race for another six-year term representing the state.
If he loses, Senate Democrats could see their 47-seat minority shrink even further. The party will also be defending a seat in Michigan, a swing state Trump won last November, but are hoping to unseat GOP senators in Maine and North Carolina.
Trump is due to sign an executive order to encourage domestic drug manufacturing, according to Reuters. We’ll bring you more detail on that as soon as we get it.
The day so far
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The White House said in a clarifying statement that “no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made” after Donald Trump abruptly announced on his Truth Social platform last night a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, sparking widespread concern across the film industry.
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TeleMessage, the communications app used by Mike Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser of Signalgate fame (as snapped during last week’s cabinet meeting the day before he was fired), said it was temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its messages.
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Further evidence came to light regarding the scope of the Trump administration’s highly controversial and aggressive efforts to reach agreements with more countries to receive third-country deportees from the US. Reuters reported that Rwanda was in “early stage” discussions with the Trump administration and and according to internal federal government documents obtained by CBS News, the administration has also approached the likes of Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Libya, Moldova and as mentioned above Rwanda to aid its aggressive mass deportation efforts.
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A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued on Monday in an attempt to block Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.
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Prominent figures in the Maga movement came out against the bipartisan IGO Anti-Boycott Act, House Resolution 867 saying it would criminalize boycotts and free speech against Israel, after which a scheduled vote on the legislation today was canceled.
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Trump is scheduled to meet at the White House today with Russian American ballerina Ksenia Karelina, who was released from a Russian prison last month after spending more than a year in custody following allegations of financially supporting Ukraine’s military.
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Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence received a John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award on Sunday for his actions on January 6, when he defied Trump’s demands to overturn the 2020 election. Accepting the award, Pence said: “I will always believe by God’s grace that I did my duty that day.”
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Drugmakers warned that Americans would suffer most if Trump imposed tariffs on imports of pharmaceuticals, as medications would become more expensive and potentially unaffordable for some people.
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Trump announced that the 2027 NFL draft will take place in Washington DC and outlined a plan to hold it on the National Mall.
App used by former national security adviser Mike Waltz says it is temporarily suspending services following reported hack
Speaking of Mike Waltz, the communications app used by Donald Trump’s former national security adviser says it is temporarily suspending services following a reported hack that exposed some of its messages.
Reuters reports that in an email, Portland, Oregon-based Smarsh, which runs the TeleMessage app, said it was “investigating a potential security incident” and was suspending all its services “out of an abundance of caution”.
Photos taken at Trump’s cabinet meeting last week revealed that, the day before he was fired, Waltz and other top White House officials were communicating using TeleMessage – an even less secure version of the Signal messaging app that was at the center of a huge national security scandal last month that was key in dooming Waltz to his dramatic demotion.
The images, taken by Reuters on Wednesday, show messages between Waltz and contacts who appear to be JD Vance, the vice-president; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, who has for now replaced Waltz as acting national security adviser; Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence; and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy to the Middle East who has played a key role in negotiations with Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war.
Asked last night about the potential for White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to be his long-term pick for national security adviser following the dramatic sacking of Mike Waltz last week, Semafor reports that Trump is very clearly not ruling it out.
“Stephen Miller is at the top of the totem pole,” the president said. “I mean, I think he sort of indirectly already has that job. He has a lot to say about a lot of things. He’s a very valued person in the administration.”
Conflicting reports arose at the end of last week over the future of the national security adviser role. Politico reported that Marco Rubio, who has taken on the position “in the interim”, was slated to keep his dual roles as secretary of state and national security adviser for at least six months and the positions could even become permanent. Rubio’s placement was not meant to be a temporary slot-in, reported Politico, citing three senior White House officials.
That contrasted with an earlier Axios report that Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s aggressive and highly controversial immigration crackdown, had been garnering buzz as a top candidate for the role. With Trump’s latest comments, it looks like Miller is very much still in the running for the job.
Trump said he had “nothing to do with” the production of an AI-generated image that showed him dressed like a pope but said it was done in jest.
“I just saw it last evening,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. He said his wife, Melania Trump, thought it was “cute”. Despite Trump’s claim that “the Catholics loved it”, some in the Catholic community have criticized the image.
The former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi said the image was shameful. “This is an image that offends believers, insults institutions and shows that the leader of the rightwing world enjoys clowning around,” he wrote on X.
In the US, the New York State Catholic Conference, which represents the bishops of the state, accused Trump of mockery.
“There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President,” they wrote. “We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St Peter. Do not mock us.”
Asked about his administration’s push to get undocuments immigrants to “self-deport” in exchange for $1,000, Trump – apparently forgetting that due process is a constitutional right, as he did yesterday – said the courts were getting in the way of his deportation efforts.
Speaking from the Oval Office, he said:
It’s a very difficult thing with the courts. The courts have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, said maybe you have to have trials. We’re gonna have 5 million trials? Doesn’t work. You wouldn’t have a country left. But hopefully the supreme court will save it. But what they’ve done is a very very serious thing.
In his interview with NBC News yesterday Trump tripled down on his assertion that the prospect of American kids having fewer toys as a result of his tariff policy driving up prices is a good thing. He said:
I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl needs – that’s 11 years old – needs to have 30 dolls. I think they can have three dolls or four dolls, because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.
I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five. We don’t have to waste money on a trade deficit with China for things we don’t need, for junk that we don’t need.
Politico notes: “From a philosophical point of view, we’re trying to think of the last time an American president – or any western leader – decided to argue against abundance and consumer choice. From a political point of view, these quotes have a dangerous whiff of ‘let them eat cake’ about them, given how many American families are just trying to make ends meet. Naturally, Trump’s opponents are already pulling out old [and very gold] photos of his own children that suggest they were not exactly subjected to these kinds of constraints themselves.”
Trump says Washington DC will host 2027 NFL draft
Donald Trump has just announced that the 2027 NFL draft will take place in Washington DC. Speaking from the Oval Office alongside NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, Trump laid out a goal to have the draft on the National Mall. He said:
It’s gonna be beautiful. It’s gonna be something that nobody else will be able to duplicate.
Democratic-led states sue Trump administration for blocking wind energy projects
A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general sued on Monday in an attempt to block Donald Trump’s move to suspend leasing and permitting of new wind projects, saying it threatens to cripple the wind industry and a key source of clean energy.
Reuters reports that 17 states and the District of Columbia argued, in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston, that the decision by the Trump administration to indefinitely pause all federal wind-energy approvals was unlawful and must be blocked.
Trump announced the pause on his first day back in office on 20 January when he directed his administration to halt offshore wind lease sales and stop the issuance of permits, leases and loans for both onshore and offshore wind projects.
“This administration is devastating one of our nation’s fastest-growing sources of clean, reliable and affordable energy,” New York’s Democratic attorney general, Letitia James, said in a statement.
The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the indefinite pause unlawful and barring the agencies including the US Departments of Commerce and Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from implementing Trump’s directive.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
US seeking deportation deals with further countries including Angola and Equatorial Guinea – report
Earlier we reported that Rwanda is in “early stage” discussions with the Trump administration to potentially receiving third-country deportees from the US, according to the country’s foreign minister. According to internal federal government documents obtained by CBS News, the administration has also approached the likes of Angola and Equatorial Guinea to aid its aggressive mass deportation efforts.
The administration has already brokered agreements with several Latin American countries willing to accept migrants who are not their own. In February, the US deported hundreds of African and Asian people to Costa Rica and Panama. In March, the Trump administration sent nearly 300 Venezuelans accused of being gang members to El Salvador, which is being paid millions of dollars to detain them in its infamous mega-prison.
Guatemala has also agreed to take in third-country deportees from the US. The Mexican government, under a deal that precedes Trump’s second term, has been receiving migrants from other Latin American countries, like Venezuela, caught crossing the US southern border illegally.
But per CBS’s report, the Trump administration has identified further countries that could potentially accept deportations of third country nationals, including Angola, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Libya, Moldova and Rwanda, according to the internal government documents and officials. The US has yet to announce any formal deals with these countries.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the internal talks with some of these countries in April. The negotiations with Angola and Equatorial Guinea have not been previously reported.
One of the ideas under consideration, the internal government documents show, would be for the US to use the agreements to deport suspected members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang Trump has made into a focal point of his crackdown on illegal immigration.
During last Wednesday’s cabinet meeting, secretary of state Marco Rubio confirmed the Trump administration was “actively searching for other countries to take people from third countries”. He said:
We are working with other countries to say, ‘we want to send you some of the most despicable human beings to your countries’. ‘Would you do that, as a favor to us? And the further away from America, the better.’
Americans would suffer most if Trump imposes pharma tariffs, sector warns
Julia Kollewe
Drugmakers have warned that Americans would suffer most if Donald Trump imposed tariffs on imports of pharmaceuticals, as medications would become more expensive and potentially unaffordable for some people.
Drugmakers have been braced for targeted border taxes – similar to the 25% levies on steel, aluminium and car imports – after the president threatened to hit the sector and announced an investigation last month. Last week, Trump hinted at a possible reprieve for companies, saying they would be given time to move their operations to the US, but “after that it’s going to be a tariff wall put up, and they won’t be happy about it”, he added.
Giovanni Barbella, the global head of strategy and supply chain at the Swiss multinational Sandoz, one of the world’s biggest makers of generic drugs, said tariffs would lead to supply disruptions and price increases, hitting US patients hardest. He said:
We are producing products on a very tight margin. That’s the nature of our industry. So ultimately, higher production cost, including the cost of tariffs, will lead to higher prices.
Rwanda in ‘early stages’ of talks with Trump administration over taking in people deported from US
Rwanda is in talks with the Trump administration to potentially take in people deported from the US, the country’s foreign minister said late on Sunday.
Rwanda’s foreign minister, Olivier Nduhungirehe, said that his country’s government was in “early stage” discussions about receiving third-country deportees from the US.
“It is true that we are in discussions with the United States,” Nduhungirehe said in an interview with Rwanda TV, reported Reuters. “These talks are still ongoing, and it would be premature to conclude how they will unfold,” he added.
The move appears to be another step by the Trump administration to pursue swift deportations, several of which have lacked thorough due process. In a highly controversial arrangement worth millions of dollars, it has already paid El Salvador to incarcerate hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members deported from the US in its notorious mega-prison.
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