Protesters Take Over Trump Tower to Demand Release of Mahmoud Khalil

Hundreds of Jewish New Yorkers and allies staged a sit-in at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestine activist and recent Columbia University graduate who was kidnapped by ICE agents last Saturday night.

Over 300 protesters, many of them affiliated with anti-Zionist organizing group Jewish Voice for Peace, took over the tower around 11:30 a.m. They chanted, “We want justice. You say, how? Bring Mahmoud home now!” and “Fight Nazis, not students.” About 100 protesters were arrested, according to NBC News.

“My grandmother lost her cousins in the Holocaust. I grew up on these stories. We know what happens when authoritarian regimes begin targeting people, begin abducting them at night, separating their families and scapegoating,” JVP spokesperson Sonya Meyerson-Knox told NBC. “And we know that it’s one step from here to losing all right to protest and then further horrors happening, as we have seen too well in our history. We’re calling on everyone to speak up today because otherwise we won’t be able to tomorrow.”

Republicans are trying to spin Donald Trump’s decision to kneecap the U.S. stock market by arguing that the United States doesn’t actually want to have a booming economy.

Montana Senator Tim Sheehy appeared on CNN Wednesday evening, where he was faced with a brutal CNN poll that found a whopping 56 percent of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy.

Earlier this week, the stock market plummeted after Trump refused to say that the U.S. wasn’t heading toward a recession caused by his steep tariffs against its closest trading partners.

Sheehy had his own explanation for why Wall Street falling was actually OK.

“Well, first of all the stock market’s been on a sugar high for a long time,” he said.

“There’s a fundamental difference between public spending and private spending. And what we’ve seen over the past several years, past three and a half years specifically, is unprecedented money printing into the market. And to be quite frank, a lot of companies benefited from that,” Sheehy said.

Sheehy claimed that a handful of mega-tech companies had driven the stock market index to an all-time high.

“We all love a good stock market, but the reality is that stock market imbalance didn’t necessarily benefit the smaller, midsize companies and average shareholders across the country,” he said.

And Sheehy knows something about big business. He recently won his seat in Montana thanks to the backing of 12 billionaires, including members of the Walton family and organizations linked to Charles Koch and Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone—which owns the Wyoming oil and gas pipeline company Tallgrass Energy, of which Sheehy’s brother is the president.*

Sheehy insisted Wednesday that the “stock market is not the economy,” and said that “uncertainty” would cause disruptions as Trump attempted to create a new “economic landscape.”

Sheehy’s coping mechanism was similar to that of the dumbest U.S. senator, Tommy Tuberville, who was interviewed on Fox Business Monday.

“People are looking at the stock market like, ‘Hey this is how it’s going to continue to be for months and months and months’—that’s not gonna happen,” Tuberville said. “We were probably over-bloated with the stock market here, for a while.”

* This piece has been updated to clarify who is the CEO of Blackstone.

The Trump administration has asked the U.S. military to draw up options for retaking the Panama Canal. 

President Trump has been pushing for retaking the canal since December, and repeated his desire in a joint address to Congress last week, without any elaboration. The rest of the Trump administration hasn’t attempted to explain what he means, either. 

The military is drawing up options, according to NBC News, that range from a closer partnership with the Panamanian military to soldiers seizing the Panama Canal by force, according to unnamed officials. The use of force depends on how much Panama’s military is willing to work with the United States, the officials told NBC News. 

The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, presented the different strategies to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier this week. The plan to use military force against Panama will only be considered if posting additional U.S. military personnel does not accomplish Trump’s goal of “reclaiming” the canal, the officials said.  

Right now, the U.S. has more than 200 troops in the country, including Special Forces units working with Panamanian units to combat internal unrest. Trump claims China has troops in the canal, which Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino denies, as does China. In February, Panama decided not to renew an infrastructure agreement with China, drawing criticism from the country toward the U.S. 

China “firmly opposes the U.S. smearing and undermining the Belt and Road cooperation through means of pressure and coercion,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian, referring to the country’s Belt and Road development initiative. 

Later this month, Hegseth is expected to visit Panama, where discussions on increasing U.S. troop presence in the canal zone will take place. The Cabinet secretary is fully on board with Trump’s desire to retake the canal, saying in January that the U.S. has “the right—we retain the right—to do what is necessary to make sure there is free navigation in the Panama Canal.”

The canal is one of the busiest waterways in the world, with most of the cargo passing through heading to or from the U.S. Any disruption or blocking of the canal would have devastating effects on the U.S. as well as the world economy. But Trump has proven during his presidency that his personal wishes outweigh any economic concerns, no matter how absurd.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the mass firing of federal employees was an “unlawful” directive by the Office of Personnel Management.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered several agencies to “immediately” reinstate all fired probationary employees. Those agencies included the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Departments of Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Agriculture. That would also restore numbers at the Internal Revenue Service, which falls under the helm of the Treasury Department and has been hit hard by job cuts in recent weeks.

In a hearing leading up to the decision, Alsup torched the Trump administration’s decision not to submit OPM director Chad Ezell for questioning as a “sham,” and accused the White House’s effort to cast the firings as performance failures as “a gimmick.”

“It is sad, a sad day, when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said, according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The Trump administration has fired at least 30,000 employees with the help of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has made a point to target probationary employees still within the first year of their roles. Some of those employees have been called to return, but most are still not working, reported Axios.

Alsup’s order comes as federal agencies are due to submit “reduction memos” to the White House that could affect as many as 250,000 additional federal employees who fit that criteria.

Alsup further accused the administration of hiding the facts of who directed the layoffs.

“You will not bring the people in here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so because you know cross-examination would reveal the truth,” the California judge told a DOJ attorney, according to Politico. “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.… I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk has promised that his efforts to slash the government would be “maximally transparent”—but instead, the billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency has only worked to obscure the facts of its operation to slash the federal government.

DOGE’s first batch of published savings was riddled with errors, with experts pointing out that the math wasn’t adding up in its accounting. By Wednesday, the group reported—without receipts—that it had saved the government $115 billion through a “combination of asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions.”

Fact-checking DOGE’s details, however, revealed that the organization has confused billions with millions, tripled the savings from nixing one contract, claimed credit for canceling programs that ended under the Bush administration, and said it spared $1.9 billion for ending an IRS contract that was actually axed under President Joe Biden. The group later deleted these details from its “savings” page.

But rather than push to improve accuracy in its reporting, DOGE decided to go the opposite route and make its new claims even harder to check.

On March 2, Musk’s group posted a note that it had saved taxpayers another $10 billion by terminating thousands of federal grants. But instead of pointing to specifics for the savings—as it had done before—DOGE opted not to include identifying details related to the slashed grants, The New York Times reported Thursday. The White House claimed the new policy was instituted for security reasons.

Regardless, the Times was able to identify the relevant receipts by examining DOGE’s publicly available source code, which momentarily retained the federal identification numbers of the grants, and discovered that DOGE’s latest batch of savings was just as dishonest and illegitimate as previous rounds. DOGE deleted the ID numbers from their source code shortly after the grant details became known—but not before the Times retained a copy.

“At least five of the 20 largest ‘savings’ appeared to be exaggerated, according to federal data and interviews with the nonprofits whose grants were on the list,” the Times reported.

The largest item DOGE claimed to have produced savings from included a $1.75 billion grant distributed by USAID. But the recipient of the grant, a public health nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, told the Times that not only had the grant not been terminated but the funds had already been fully distributed. That means that slashing the program would have resulted in exactly $0.00 in federal savings.