European Union Issues Grim Warning Over Trump’s Looming Tariffs

Donald Trump’s global tariff “Liberation Day” begins April 2—but European officials say that they have their own hand to play in the U.S. president’s trade war.

“Europe has not started this confrontation,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told lawmakers Tuesday at a European Parliament session in Strasbourg, France. “We do not necessarily want to retaliate, but if it is necessary, we have a strong plan to retaliate and we will use it.

“Europe holds a lot of cards, from trade to technology to the size of our market. But this strength is also built on our readiness to take firm counter measures if necessary. All instruments are on the table,” von der Leyen said.

The European Union is composed of 27 member countries, several of which have stood as America’s longest and strongest allies, including France, Germany, and Spain.

After Trump announced forthcoming aluminum and steel tariffs on the continental bloc, the EU said it would impose a $26 billion levy on imported U.S. goods.

Trump has also managed to shut American companies out of other deals with the international coalition, including the European Union’s $800 billion defense spending plan. That followed revelations that Canada and Portugal were similarly wobbling on whether to buy American when restocking their military arsenals.

But beyond nickels and dimes, Trump’s whiplash tariffs and his decision to spark a global trade war have critically damaged America’s image on the international stage, wrecking the nation’s relationships with its long-standing allies.

Even America’s northern neighbor has had enough: On Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that his country’s cozy relationship with the U.S. had come to an end and that Canada would wean itself off American products and services “at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

But the EU is waiting to assess the impact of Trump’s tariffs before issuing more retaliatory tariffs, though von der Leyen is reportedly consulting with member states about another round—worth $18 billion—that would cover steel, aluminum, poultry, beef, seafood, and nuts, per The Guardian.

“So many Europeans feel utterly disheartened by the announcement from the United States,” von der Leyen said. “This is the largest and most prosperous trade relationship worldwide. We would all be better off if we could find a constructive solution.”

Senator Cory Booker is in hour 15 of a Senate floor “filibuster” at the time of this writing. He started the marathon speech in protest of Trump at 7 p.m. on Monday.  

While technically not an official filibuster—since no legislation is being blocked—the New Jersey Democrat’s lengthy speech will likely disrupt the Senate’s schedule if it goes past noon. 

While he covered everything from 9/11 to the New York Giants, Booker used the majority of his speech to excoriate President Trump and the outsize influence of Elon Musk and DOGE, who he says have displayed a “complete disregard for the rule of law, the Constitution, and the needs of the American people.”

This speech is one of the more aggressive anti-Trump actions that the Democratic Party has taken, and is certainly a louder, more direct demonstration than the protest signs some Democratic lawmakers held up at the State of the Union. Booker has been helped along at multiple points of his speech by Senators Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, and others. Booker also read personal accounts from both citizens and noncitizens living in fear of things like Musk and Trump’s cuts to Social Security or ICE detainment. 

“Today, 73 million Americans count on Social Security. Millions more than that are planning on those benefits they earn being there for them. You heard from that first letter I read that people are really worried. Forty percent of people who rely on Social Security—40 percent—have no other source of income,” Booker said, around 2 a.m. on Monday night. “You don’t fix America by throwing seniors, or veterans, or Americans with disabilities under the bus. That’s not how we do things.… Social Security is not the government’s money to spend. It’s the hard-earned savings of working Americans, and it belongs to Americans. The president and Elon Musk need to keep their hands off of it. It’s not theirs to take.” Neither Musk nor Trump have commented on Booker’s speech. 

The record for longest official filibuster is still held by legendary racist Strom Thurmond, who railed against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered New York prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter.

“Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson — an innocent man and father of two young children — was a premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America,” Bondi wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again.”

Mangione was charged with first-degree murder “in furtherance of an act of terrorism” by state prosecutors. He has pleaded not guilty to all state charges.

Mangione has a history of severe back pain and noted in an alleged manifesto that the U.S. has the “most expensive healthcare system in the world” but “ranks #42 in life expectancy.”

“United [Healthcare] is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it,” he wrote. The U.S. actually ranks even lower in life expectancy at sixtieth in the world. It is by far the most expensive.

A jury trial date has not been set.

This story has been updated.

Republicans are finally admitting that Donald Trump’s tariff plan will hurt Americans.

CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins probed Montana Senator Tim Sheehy’s thoughts on the country’s economic trajectory in an interview Monday, highlighting that 95 percent of his state’s imported goods come from Canada, Mexico, or China.

“Is this going to hurt people in your state, do you think?” asked Collins.

“There’s absolutely going to be short-term pain,” Sheehy said. “I mean, if you’re going to remodel your house to make it better in the end, it’s gonna be really annoying in the short-term when your house is getting remodeled, and there’s drywall dust everywhere and there’s workers in your living room.”

But knowing that the president’s plan won’t bode well for his constituents isn’t enough for Sheehy to pull his support.

“The reality is that remodel has got to happen in order to make things stronger and more stable in the back end,” Sheehy added.

Other Republican lawmakers have similarly conceded that Trump’s plan will be a painful transition. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville told Fox Business Monday that Trump’s plan would be a “slow pain” before “the gain” of potential stateside manufacturing jobs, while Oklahoma Senator James Lankford echoed Sheehy’s construction metaphor.

“I feel like in some ways in the economy this is kind of like a kitchen remodel or a bath remodel,” Lankford told CNN on Sunday. “It’s going to be noisy for a little while, but we all know where we’re headed: trying to reduce the prices for Americans and increase jobs.”

Trump has dubbed April 2, the date his tariffs go into effect, “Liberation Day.” But the president’s casual disregard for how his economic plan will affect American wallets was on full display over the weekend, when he told NBC News’s Kristin Welker that he “couldn’t care less” if American autoworkers raised the prices of their cars as a result of his tariffs.

“I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars. We have plenty,” Trump told NBC.

It was one of the first instances in which Trump has openly acknowledged the imminent damage.

Since he was on the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly attempted to spin the tariff pitch, claiming that it will be foreign countries who pay the difference on the rising cost of goods rather than Americans. But economists have pointed out that’s not how tariffs work. Instead, Trump’s global tariff war is expected to affect just about every sector of life for the average American.

Products that will see prices rise include groceries such as avocados, maple syrup, ground beef, cherry tomatoes, sugar, bananas, nuts, cooking oil, squash, cucumbers, strawberries, and pineapples. Trump’s tariff-related executive orders have also had immediate ramifications for countless other business sectors, raising the price on everything from liquor to gas.

Children’s toys, shoes, beer and alcohol, and crude oil were all hit in Trump’s 25 percent tariff hike on Canada and Mexico, alongside an additional 10 percent tariff on China. Car manufacturers BMW, Audi, Nissan, and Mazda were also affected, as was American-owned Ford. And every industry that relies on lumber, aluminum, and steel—from artisan goods to construction—will see mark-ups as the materials themselves become more costly.

The rising cost of screws, for instance, has already started to affect supply chains for American companies that make everything from “car parts to appliances and football helmets to lawn mowers,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration is reviving its “deferred resignation” program as an incentive for federal workers in the Department of Housing and Urban Development to leave their jobs.

The department announced the move Monday in a post on X, saying that it will extend the resignation offer until April 11 in coordination with the Office of Personnel Management, which has recently been taken over by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The post claimed that 7.4 percent of HUD workers took the offer the first time around. Under the initial program’s terms, workers would be able to resign but still receive pay through September.

The resignation offer faced a number of legal challenges in the initial weeks of the Trump administration and caused ripple effects in several agencies, even hindering the president’s mass deportation efforts. HUD has already experienced several cuts, including a $1 billion affordable housing program that maintains livable residences for low-income residents and another that provides necessary supplemental disaster relief.

Now it seems that the Trump administration is still desperate to cut the budget, probably to offset the fact that DOGE is actually costing the government as much as $500 billion in revenue. Will any HUD workers take the offer this time around?

Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mass firings have begun at the Health and Human Services Department.

HHS employees started receiving layoff emails on Tuesday, just days after Trump signed an executive order revoking the collective bargaining rights of most federal workers. Ten thousand HHS workers are expected to be fired.

This loss, along with the other 10,000 people who resigned or took buyouts, has led to HHS losing a quarter of its employees, bringing its workforce down to about 62,000 people. The firings include at least four NIH institute and center directors, and nearly the entire communications staff, according to the Associated Press. One email obtained by the AP offered department heads stationed in Bethesda, Maryland, long-term leave or relocation to Alaska.

“We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective,” Kennedy wrote on X over a video announcing the layoffs last week. “We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation—to Make America Healthy Again.”

According to a Wall Street Journal report last week, the HHS cuts will include:

—3,500 people fired at the Food and Drug Administration
—2,400 fired at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
—1,200 fired at the NIH
—300 fired at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

These are all very active departments that help maximize public safety. Now they’ll be under the thumb of RFK Jr.’s anti-science, pro-conspiracy MAHA platform. In addition to the firings, RFK Jr.’s HHS has revoked over $11 billion in Covid-19 aid funding, leading to layoffs at state and local level health departments.

“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” RFK Jr. said.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is seeking 20 years for a Colorado man who allegedly firebombed one of Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships—in a blatantly political stunt to chase down dissidents.

Bondi announced Monday that federal prosecutors were seeking the decades-long sentence for 24-year-old Cooper Jo Frederick, who was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of throwing an incendiary device between two vehicles outside of a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado, on March 7.

“All of these cases are a serious threat to public safety, therefore, there will be no negotiating,” Bondi said in a video statement posted to X, clearly intended to have a chilling effect on the nationwide spate of vandalism.

Bondi claimed that justice was coming for those involved in the so-called “wave of domestic terrorism” against Tesla, owned by the Trump administration’s resident billionaire bureaucrat.

This appears to be an extreme sentencing for a federal firebombing case. In April 2024, a Wisconsin man was sentenced to 90 months, or about seven and a half years, for attacking a building with a Molotov cocktail in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Another man was sentenced to nine years for firebombing a Planned Parenthood and plotting other attacks in grievance of a race war.

Clearly, Bondi is waging a political battle as much as a legal one, despite her promises that she would not act merely as an operative for Donald Trump.

Musk has continued to complain about how much money Tesla is losing while he serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, which intends to slash government spending through mass layoffs and the gutting of essential services and agencies. DOGE is currently sifting through the Social Security Administration, creating widespread access issues for the millions of Americans who rely on it.

Tesla shares were down more than 7 percent Monday and have plummeted 35 percent so far this year.

Organizers held a Tesla Takedown Global Day of Action Saturday, and held rallies at over 200 Tesla locations, including close to 50 in California.

At least some Republicans are eyeing a special election in Florida as their party’s getaway car from Elon Musk.

Across the country and around the world, people are protesting at Tesla dealerships and destroying Musk’s vehicles in rejection of his politics. The billionaire’s outsize influence over President Donald Trump and his cavalier approach to gutting the federal government—combined with some jarring losses for Republicans in deep-Trump territory—has made Musk an increasingly polarizing figure in Washington and has forced some Republicans to sour on the Musk connection.

At least one GOP lawmaker told Politico that an “April 1st massacre” would be a “beautiful thing,” and would awaken other Republican lawmakers to Musk’s damaging political affiliation.

“There will be 26 or so people watching Tuesday, and they’ll decide how they want to be part of the team going forward,” the unidentified House Republican said, referring to more than a couple dozen endangered GOP lawmakers.

That’s partly because Musk routinely distributes “wrong” information about government spending and forthcoming cuts, angering their local constituents.

“Elon’s work needs to wrap up, and he needs to exit stage left,” another House Republican told Politico.

The Republican candidate in one House race in deep-red Florida believes the election will be an indicator of Democratic rage against the federal administration, rather than a symbol of local conservative ire. State Senator Randy Fine is up against Josh Weil, an Orlando-area teacher.

“If you polled the district, you would find exactly the same sentiment about Donald Trump today as last November,” Fine—who is currently neck and neck with Weil in the Trump stronghold—told Politico Monday. “But what we need to take from it is the rage the Democrats feel.”

“We have to make our people understand that Donald Trump being president does not solve all of our problems, he needs a Congress to be behind him,” Fine said.

The Trump administration has admitted that it mistakenly deported a man to a notorious prison in El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” despite the government’s repeated insistence that there were no errors in their flight determinations.

A sworn statement filed late Tuesday from a top Immigration and Customs official said that the removal of Kilmer Armado Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorean national, had been the result of an “administrative error.”

In 2019, Abrego Garcia was arrested, and although he was not charged with anything, he was served a notice to appear at removal proceedings. At the time, Abrego Garcia was denied bond because a confidential informant advised that he was a member of MS-13, according to the filing. No actual evidence of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership was provided. He was not, as Vice President JD Vance suggested on X, a “convicted” member of MS-13.

Abrego Garcia then filed an I-589 application for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. He had come to the U.S. in 2011, fleeing threats of gang violence at the age of 16, according to The Atlantic.

Although he was found to be removable, the immigration judge granted him a “withholding of removal,” a protected legal status meaning he could not be deported to El Salvador, where he would likely become a target for gang violence.

Abrego Garcia was released from custody and has been living in Maryland with his wife and 5-year-old child, who is disabled. He and his wife work full-time to support their family.

Robert Cerna, an acting field office director at the Harlingnen Field Office in Texas, where the flights ferrying 261 alleged gang members to El Salvador were staged, said in a statement that Abrego Garcia should not have been included in the flight manifest and that ICE was well aware of the hold on his removal, as it was referred to on internal forms.

Still, Abrego Garcia was included as an “alternate” for removal, Cerna said. “As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. The manifest did not indicate that Abrego Garcia should not be removed.”

“Through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13.”

A judge denied his family’s request for an injunction because the U.S. no longer has custody of Abrego Garcia, who now wrongfully sits in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights abuses.

Vance went on the defensive Tuesday morning, repeatedly claiming in posts on X that an immigration judge had determined that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but again he got his facts wrong.

“In 2019, an Immigration Judge (under the Biden administration) determined that the deported man was, in fact, a member of the MS-13 gang,” Vance wrote, apparently forgetting that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, was president from 2016 to 2021.

“He also apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court. A real winner,” Vance continued, as if that somehow made Abrego Garcia a worthy candidate for torture and gang violence.

Elon Musk and DOGE just soft-fired everyone at the federal agency that supports local libraries and museums nationwide. 

All 70 Institute of Museum and Library Services employees were sent an email on Monday placing them on an immediate paid administrative leave, according to the American Federation of Government Employees union. 

This comes just two weeks after President Trump signed an executive order calling for IMLS to be shut down, and days after DOGE operatives infiltrated the IMLS facility while purging its leadership. 

“Earlier today, the Institute of Museum and Library Services notified the entire staff that they are being placed on administrative leave immediately. The notification followed a brief meeting between DOGE staff and IMLS leadership,” a statement from AFGE  read. “Employees were required to turn in all government property prior to exiting the building, and email accounts are being disabled today. Museums and libraries will no longer be able to contact IMLS staff for updates about the funding they rely upon.”

The IMLS has a $313 million annual budget and distributes taxpayer money to museums and libraries across the country. Its stated goal is to “advance, support, and empower America’s museums, libraries, and related organizations through grantmaking, research, and policy development.”

“In the absence of staff, all work processing 2025 applications has ended,” AFGE noted. “The status of previously awarded grants is unclear. Without staff to administer the programs, it is likely that most grants will be terminated.”