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Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back

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Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back

After President Trump left the White House in 2021, critics of his norm-breaking use of executive power implored Congress to tighten legal limits on when presidents can unilaterally reshape American government with the stroke of a pen. But lawmakers largely did not act.

On Monday, as Mr. Trump took the oath of office to begin his second term, he asserted a muscular vision of presidential power. He not only revived some of the same expansive understandings of executive authority that were left unaddressed, but went even further with new claims of sweeping and inherent constitutional clout.

Among a blizzard of executive orders, Mr. Trump instructed prosecutors not to enforce a law that bans the popular social media app TikTok until its Chinese owner sells it. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had signed the measure into law after it passed with broad bipartisan support, and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it.

Whatever the law’s merits, the Constitution says presidents “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Mr. Trump offered no clear explanation for how he has any legitimate power to instead suspend the law, making only a vague gesture toward his “constitutional responsibility” for national security, foreign policy “and other vital executive functions.”

Unilateral actions like emergency declarations and executive orders cannot create new legal powers for a president. Instead, they are a vehicle by which presidents exercise legal authority they already have, either because the Constitution has bestowed it upon their office or because Congress passed a law creating it.

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That said, there are often disputes about the proper interpretation of the scope and limits of executive power. It is not uncommon for a president to use an executive order to take some action whose legal legitimacy is contested, leading to court fights that ultimately come before the Supreme Court.

It is not clear that anyone opposed to suspending the TikTok law would have standing to sue. But many of Mr. Trump’s moves concerned immigration law, making it very likely that legal challenges will follow and the legitimacy of his executive power claims will land before judges.

In several orders, Mr. Trump invoked his constitutional role as the military’s commander in chief, portraying migrants as invaders while blurring the line between immigration law enforcement and war powers.

“As commander in chief, I have no higher responsibility than to defend our country from threats and invasions, and that is exactly what I am going to do,” he said in his inaugural speech.

Among those orders, Mr. Trump declared that newly arriving migrants may not invoke a law allowing them to request asylum. As a basis, he said the Constitution gave him “inherent powers” to “prevent the physical entry of aliens involved in an invasion into the United States,” in addition to citing a few vague provisions of immigration laws.

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Another such order directed the U.S. Northern Command, which oversees military operations in continental North America, to swiftly draw up a plan for a “campaign” to seal the border “by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”

Mr. Trump and his advisers have talked about invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as additional immigration agents at the border. But the order referred only to his constitutional power as commander in chief, raising the possibility that he is envisioning using troops for a military operation rather than to act as law enforcement.

Some of the orders were a return to fights over executive power that surfaced during Mr. Trump’s first term.

On Monday, Mr. Trump reprised a move from 2019 by declaring a national emergency at the border. He also invoked a statute that allows presidents, during an emergency, to redirect military funds for construction projects related to the exigency. His purpose, in 2019 and again now, was to spend more taxpayer money on a border wall project than lawmakers authorized.

Is there really an emergency that an extended border wall would address, and that would justify circumventing Congress’s role in deciding where to direct taxpayer money?

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A wall does not address the main border problem in recent years: the overwhelming number of migrants requesting asylum, flooding the system and leading to lengthy backlogs for hearings. And over the past seven months, illegal crossings have plunged to the lowest levels since the summer of 2020, during the early phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

But facts matter little to whether or when it is legal for presidents to invoke emergency power, declarations that are governed by the National Emergencies Act of 1976.

That law does not tightly define the circumstances under which presidents may determine that an emergency exists, leaving them with essentially unfettered discretion to unlock exigent powers for themselves. But previous presidents adhered to norms of self-restraint.

In his first term, critics challenged the legal legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s border wall spending, but the Supreme Court never resolved the dispute before Mr. Biden took office and canceled the projects. So any new legal challenge would have to start from scratch.

In the wake of Mr. Trump’s first term, House Democrats in 2021 passed a bill that would have tightened limits on presidential use of emergency powers, part of a package of reforms they called the “Protecting Our Democracy Act.” But Republicans opposed the measure as a partisan attack on a president who was no longer in office anyway, rendering it dead on arrival in the Senate.

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Mr. Trump’s absence from the presidency, however, turned out to be temporary.

In the show of force upon his return to office, he also declared a national energy emergency so that, as he said in his inaugural speech, “we will drill, baby, drill.” No president has declared that type of emergency before, and it empowers him to suspend legal protections for the environment and to speed up permits for new oil and gas projects.

The nation’s energy situation hardly seems like an emergency: The United States is producing more oil than any country ever has, in no small part because of the fracking boom and because of thousands of new permits to drill on federal lands issued by the Biden administration — outpacing Mr. Trump’s first-term record. Prices for gasoline, natural gas and electricity are relatively low compared with their historical levels.

But the order said Mr. Trump had determined that Biden administration policies had “driven our nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action.” He also cited a growing need for electricity to run computer servers for artificial intelligence projects.

Elizabeth Goitein, a director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program who has written extensively on presidential emergency power, predicted that many of Mr. Trump’s planned actions would be challenged in court.

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“Emergency powers should never be used to address longstanding problems like unlawful migration that can and should be addressed through legislation,” said Ms. Goitein, who was among those calling on Congress to curb presidential power. “The bad news is that Congress failed to enact reforms to the National Emergencies Act that would have helped prevent such abuses.”

There is no dispute that Mr. Trump had legitimate authority to take other unilateral actions. The Constitution clearly gives presidents unfettered authority to grant pardons to people for federal criminal offenses or to commute their sentences, for example, so there is little doubt Mr. Trump had the power to grant clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted of crimes in connection with the Capitol riot.

But Mr. Trump appeared to put forward novel or expansive interpretations of legal authorities in other ways.

He ordered his administration to make recommendations about whether to designate certain transnational gangs and drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations,” stretching a law that is intended for groups that use violence for geopolitical and ideological purposes to criminal groups that, while also violent, are motivated by profit.

He also set in motion the possibility of invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily expel immigrants suspected of being members of drug cartels and transnational criminal gangs without full due process hearings. That law’s text seems to require a link to the actions of a foreign government, so it is not clear whether the courts will allow Mr. Trump to invoke it to deny deportation hearings to people.

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Mr. Trump is also seeking to change the basic understanding of a provision of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to most babies born on American soil and “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. government. That provision has long been understood to include infants born to undocumented parents.

In an order, Mr. Trump invoked a theory developed by conservatives who want to curtail so-called birthright citizenship because they see it as a magnet for illegal immigration. By that rationale, the provision could be interpreted to not apply to babies whose parents are not American citizens or lawful permanent residents, even though visitors or undocumented people are subject to the jurisdiction of government prosecutors if they break the law.

Mr. Trump instructed agencies to refrain from issuing citizenship-affirming documents — like passports and Social Security cards — to infants born to undocumented immigrants or to parents lawfully but temporarily visiting the United States, starting with births 30 days from now.

Hours later, critics, including a coalition of Democratic-controlled states, brought multiple court challenges against it. Mr. Trump, the coalition asserted, sought to breach “this well-established and longstanding constitutional principle by executive fiat.”

It was yet another legal claim that seemed destined to come before the Supreme Court.

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Read the Letter to the Inspectors General

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Read the Letter to the Inspectors General

Your investigation of these allegations is consistent with the IG’s mission to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse in federal agencies, and can help determine if politically connected crypto interests are undermining our national security. As Congress considers legislation on the market structure for digital assets, we must ensure that cryptocurrencies like USD1 are not providing the President and senior officials with the ability to line their pockets at the expense of the public interest.

The following facts have been reported in multiple outlets regarding Mr. Witkoff:

• Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach Witkoff is the CEO of World Liberty Financial (WLF), which the President’s family owns a majority stake in.³
• Beginning in January, one of Sheikh Tahnoon’s employees, Fiacc Larkin, joined WLF as the “chief strategic advisor” while continuing to work at G42, an AI investment firm owned by Sheikh Tahnoon that, according to the U.S. intelligence community, works closely with Chinese military companies.4



On May 1, 2025, Zach Witkoff announced that MGX, a state-owned investment firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, had agreed to use a WLF-issued stablecoin, USD1, to make a $2 billion investment in Binance. As a result of this deal, WLF stands to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in transaction fees from MGX, and more from the returns on any investments it makes with the $2 billion deposit.³
As of August, Mr. Witkoff maintained a financial interest in WLF and thus stands to personally benefit from his son’s business dealings with the UAE.6 Nevertheless, he did not recuse himself from deliberations regarding the UAE, which may violate federal ethics law.

The following facts have been reported about Mr. Sacks:







He is a special government employee who continues to serve as a “general partner” at his venture capital fund, Craft Ventures.

8

The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, an Emirati sovereign wealth fund controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, was an early investor in Craft Ventures and continues to hold an investment in the fund.
In addition, Craft Ventures is invested in BitGo, which has partnered with WLF to provide the technical infrastructure for USD1. If BitGo’s valuation grows, based on the UAE’s investment into USD1, Mr. Sacks and his firm stand to benefit.

3 Yahoo Finance, “Trump family reportedly has a 60% stake in the World Liberty Financial,” Anand Sinha, March 31, 2025,
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-family-reportedly-60-stake-172742661.html.
4 New York Times, “Inside U.S. Efforts to Untangle an A.I. Giant’s Ties to China,” Mark Mazzetti and Edward
Wong, Nov. 27, 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/us/politics/ai-us-uae-china-security-g42.html.
5 New York Times, “At a Dubai Conference, Trump’s Conflicts Take Center Stage,” David Yaffe-Bellany, May 1, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/us/politics/trump-cryptocurrency-usd1-dubai-conference-

announcement.html.

6U.S Office of Government Ethics, Form 278e for Steven C. Witkoff, August 13, 2025, p. 23, https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/090d0de07e1d2fdf/bbf02867-full.pdf.

18 U.S.C. § 208.

8 White House, “Limited Waiver Pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 208(b)(1) Regarding A.I. Assets,” June 2025,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/David-Sacks.pdf.

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Farage refuses to criticise Trump over paracetamol despite health experts dismissing autism claims

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Farage refuses to criticise Trump over paracetamol despite health experts dismissing autism claims

Nigel Farage has refused to criticise Donald Trump’s claims that paracetamol, sold in the US as Tylenol, could cause autism, insisting “science is never settled” and he would never “side with” medical experts.

The Reform UK leader said he had “no idea” if the US president was right to tell pregnant women to avoid taking acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol and paracetamol, and suggesting that those who could not “tough it out” should limit their intake.

Scientists and global health agencies including the World Health Organization have strongly dismissed Trump’s false claims, calling them misguided and saying the evidence linking paracetamol use in pregnancy and autism was “inconsistent”.

The UK’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, told the British public they should not “pay any attention whatsoever to what Donald Trump says about medicine”, adding: “I trust doctors over President Trump frankly, on this.”

But in a wide-ranging interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari, Farage was asked directly if Trump was right to share those unproven claims. He said: “I have no idea, I’ve no idea. You know we were told thalidomide was a very safe drug and it wasn’t. Who knows Nick, I don’t know.

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“He [Trump] has a particular thing about autism. I think because there’s been some in his family, he feels it very personally. I’ve no idea.”

When Farage was asked if he would side with medical experts who say it is dangerous to make the link, he added: “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. When it comes to science, I don’t side with anybody, right? You know? I don’t side with anybody, because science is never settled. We should remember that.”

Yet when challenged over whether it was irresponsible for Trump to make such an unproven claim, Farage said: “That’s an opinion he’s [Trump’s] got. It’s not one that I necessarily share.”

Farage’s refusal to condemn Trump’s claims comes weeks after a controversial doctor, Aseem Malhotra, was given top billing at Reform UK’s party conference and used his main-stage speech to claim the Covid vaccine caused cancer in the royal family. Malhotra is an adviser to Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy.

In the same interview, Farage said Trump was “right to say” that sharia law “is an issue in London”.

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“Never take what he [Trump] says literally, ever on anything. But always take everything he says seriously,” Farage said, adding: Trump “has a point.”

“So is he right to say that sharia is an issue in London? Yes. Is it an overwhelming issue at this stage? No. Has the mayor of London directly linked himself to it? No.”

Labour MPs have urged Keir Starmer to reprimand Trump’s administration after the US president falsely claimed in a speech to the United Nations: “I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed.

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“Now they want to go to sharia law. But you are in a different country, you can’t do that.”

Trump has been publicly attacking the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, since 2015 when the Labour politician criticised Trump, the then presidential candidate, for suggesting that Muslims should be banned from travelling to the US.

A spokesperson for Khan said: “We are not going to dignify his appalling and bigoted comments with a response. London is the greatest city in the world, safer than major US cities and we’re delighted to welcome the record number of US citizens moving here.”

During the LBC phone-in, Farage also said Reform’s plan to ban anyone who was not a UK citizen from claiming benefits would not apply to Ukrainians and Hongkongers.

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“No, because they come for different reasons,” Farage said, adding those who had lived in the UK on indefinite leave to remain and had not worked or paid into the system would be told their benefits would be cut.

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Alphabet market value exceeds $3tn

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Alphabet market value exceeds tn

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Alphabet’s market capitalisation surged above $3tn for the first time on Monday on the back of a sharp rally for the search giant’s shares over the past few weeks.

Shares in Google’s parent company have climbed more than 30 per cent to a record high of $252 since the group posted double-digit growth in revenue and profit in quarterly results out in late July.

The rally means Alphabet joins Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple as the only US companies valued above $3tn. Chipmaker Nvidia in July became the first company to hit a $4tn market value.

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