Politics
Trump Threatens Tariffs Over Immigration, Drugs and Greenland
In his first week in office, President Trump tried to browbeat governments across the world into ending the flow of drugs into America, accepting planes full of deported migrants, halting wars and ceding territory to the United States.
For all of them, he deployed a common threat: Countries that did not meet his demands would face stiff tariffs on products they send to American consumers.
Mr. Trump has long wielded tariffs as a weapon to resolve trade concerns. But the president is now frequently using them to make gains on issues that have little to do with trade.
It is a strategy rarely seen from other presidents, and never at this frequency. While Mr. Trump threatened governments like Mexico’s with tariffs over immigration issues in his first term, he now appears to be making such threats almost daily, including on Sunday, when he said Colombia would face tariffs after its government turned back planes carrying deported immigrants.
“The willingness rhetorically to throw the kitchen sink and use the whole tool kit is trying to send the message to other countries beyond Colombia that they should comply and find ways to address these border concerns,” said Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Last week, Mr. Trump threatened to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products on Feb. 1 unless those countries did more to stop the flows of drugs and migrants into the United States. Previously, he threatened to punish Denmark with tariffs if its government would not cede Greenland to the United States and to impose levies on Russia if it would not end its war in Ukraine.
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that he would impose 25 percent tariffs on Colombia and raise them to 50 percent in one week. Within a few hours, the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro, said he would hit back with his own tariffs. But by Sunday night, the White House had released a statement saying that Mr. Petro had agreed to all of its terms, and that Mr. Trump would hold the threat of tariffs and sanctions “in reserve.”
That quick resolution may only further embolden Mr. Trump’s use of tariffs to extract concessions that have nothing to do with typical trade relations.
Speaking to House Republicans in Florida on Monday, Mr. Trump referenced his threat that countries like Colombia, Mexico and Canada reduce the flow of migrants into the United States or face tariffs.
“They’re going to take them back fast and if they don’t they’ll pay a very high economic price,” he said.
Ted Murphy, a lawyer at Sidley Austin who handles trade-related issues, said the tariffs would have been a significant blow to industries that rely on imports from Colombia, but that the implications of the threat were much broader.
“Tariffs could be used in response to almost anything,” he said.
Even having a free-trade agreement with the United States is no guarantee of safety: Colombia signed such a deal with the United States in 2011, while Mr. Trump himself signed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2020.
Mr. Trump is also not limiting himself to the trade-related laws he relied on to impose tariffs in his first term, Mr. Murphy said. For Colombia and for other nations, Mr. Trump has appeared willing to deploy a legal statute — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA — that gives presidents broad powers to impose trade and sanctions measures if they declare a national emergency.
Mr. Murphy said the bar for Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency appeared to be “not very high.”
Governments in Mexico, Canada, Europe, China and elsewhere have prepared lists of retaliatory tariffs they can apply to American products if Mr. Trump decides to follow through with his own levies. But foreign officials seem well aware of the economic damage that cross-border tariffs would cause, and have tried to defuse the tensions to avoid a damaging trade war.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, said Monday that Europe needed to unite as the Trump administration threatens to usher in an era of policy changes, including tariffs.
“As the United States shifts to a more transactional approach, Europe needs to close ranks,” Ms. Kallas said, speaking in a news conference after a meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels.
“Europe is an economic heavyweight and geopolitical partner,” she added.
Presidential use of trade-related measures for matters unrelated to trade isn’t without precedent. Douglas A. Irwin, an economic historian at Dartmouth College, pointed out that President Richard Nixon conditioned the return of Okinawa to Japan on its agreeing to limit the amount of textiles it sent into the United States. President Gerald Ford signed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked granting the Soviet Union “most favored nation” trading status — and lower tariff rates — to it allowing Jews to emigrate.
Still, Mr. Irwin called Mr. Trump’s approach “unusual.”
“Trump is very overt and transactional in his approach,” he said.
In recent decades, presidents have been less willing to wield tariffs or other measures that would restrict trade, in part out of deference to the World Trade Organization. W.T.O. members, including the United States, have agreed to certain rules around when and how they impose tariffs on other countries within the organization.
The W.T.O. carves out exceptions for its members to act on issues of national security, and governments have used that exception more liberally in recent years when imposing tariffs or limiting certain kinds of trade.
Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University, said that many administrations, including Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s, had used national security considerations “as a veil to implement tariffs and other protectionist measures without running afoul of W.T.O. rules.”
Although no U.S. president has wielded the threat of tariffs as Mr. Trump has, they have pressured other countries with other types of economic measures, like sanctions or embargoes. And in recent decades, U.S. presidents have been more willing to use trade as a carrot, rather than a stick, holding out the prospect of free trade deals and other preferential trade treatment for governments that support the country politically.
If Mr. Trump indeed goes through with his tariffs, it remains to be seen if U.S. courts ultimately decide to curtail them.
Peter Harrell, who served as White House senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, noted on social media that IEEPA had never before been used to impose the types of tariffs that Mr. Trump threatened on Colombia, Canada and Mexico. (Mr. Nixon did use a precursor statute, the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917, to briefly impose a 10 percent universal tariff in 1971 to address the trade balance, unemployment and inflation.)
Mr. Harrell suggested that such an expansive interpretation of the law could face legal challenges. He said that he was “skeptical” that courts would allow Mr. Trump to use the legal statute to impose a broad global tariff, but more targeted tariffs, like those on Colombia, would be “a much closer and more interesting test case.”
Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting from London.
WASHINGTON — President Trump used a rare prime-time address Thursday night to renew his attacks on the security of U.S. elections, telling Americans that the nation’s voting system is “so broken” that “no one can possibly defend it,” a striking effort by a sitting president to undermine public confidence in domestic elections.
Trump asserted that the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to potential foreign hacking, including by China, and said he had directed the White House to release a tranche of heavily redacted documents that purport to show “vulnerabilities” in the nation’s voting system.
But many of his claims, which echo his assertions after losing the 2020 election, have been debunked by investigations, audits or court proceedings. His warnings that the nation’s elections could be vulnerable to foreign influence have long been made by members of both parties, and he made no claims Thursday that foreign actors had changed vote counts or hacked election systems.
Trump amplified his assertions in an apparent effort to cast fresh doubt over what he said was a “stolen” and “rigged” election and renew calls for Congress to pass a federal voting law ahead of the November election.
“This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes levels never thought possible to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” Trump claimed.
The 26-minute address to the nation — a platform traditionally reserved for rare moments of national importance — comes after a series of steps by Trump in his second term to assert more federal control over elections before the November midterm elections, which are less than four months away.
Last week, Trump fired all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, a federal agency that helps states improve their voting systems and distributed election security grants to help protect state elections from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, among other things.
The Justice Department has also attempted to force states to turn over their voter rolls, an effort that more than a dozen courts have now ruled against, and said it would send election monitors to some states. Trump claimed states are refusing to turn over their voter rolls because he alleged noncitizens are registered to vote in their elections.
The president used California, a favorite target, to hint that Democrats were cheating. He cast doubt on California’s vote count in June’s primary election, saying, “It took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.”
The state’s vote count takes multiple weeks under the current system; it is not a sign of fraud.
Trump delivered the address with his approval rating stagnating at 37%, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Thursday, and with weakening enthusiasm among Republicans.
Democrats swiftly condemned Trump’s claims as baseless and a rehash of ideas that have little to do with actual election administration.
“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on X.
Multiple reviews of the 2020 election have concluded that Joe Biden won legitimately, and election experts say there is no evidence that widespread fraud affected the outcome of the election. Trump’s own attorney general in his first term, William Barr, said at the time that his department found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.
“It’s been more than half a decade, with numerous audits, recounts, and more than 60 court cases, each finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said of the 2020 election in a statement. “Clearly, this is no longer about an election Donald Trump lost six years ago. It’s about him laying the groundwork to try to ‘take over the voting’ in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Sue Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, said most of the data Trump will release has already been assessed by the intelligence community.
“Since 2016, the intelligence community has been saying that foreign actors intended to influence our election for the purpose of undermining democracy — not undermining a president, undermining democracy,” Gordon told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins after the address.
“This is not a new threat. It was one he certainly knew of. He had an entire term to deal with it,” Gordon said, “and I don’t know how you can believe that the same community who told him about it … then somehow didn’t tell him about further attempts.”
Major broadcast networks declined to air Trump’s speech in full, instead reporting on it. Trump complained about NBC and ABC as he spoke, saying they should lose their broadcasting licenses. He falsely claimed that “they and others in the media are part of a plot” to “continue this fraud.”
In his remarks, Trump alleged China carried out what is believed to be the “largest compromise of election data history” starting during the 2020 election cycle and claimed that “members of the deep state” in the American intelligence community covered it up.
Trump said China had accessed voter data of 220 million people in 18 states, but that information is generally publicly available and does not contain information that would allow a bad actor to change votes or hack into an election system.
He directed the FBI, the director of national intelligence and other agencies led by some of his loyalists to investigate and prosecute the people responsible for the alleged cover-up.
Foreign adversaries have made known attempts to influence election outcomes, but there is no evidence that adversaries have ever breached voting systems or altered votes, something that would be extraordinarily difficult to do without notice, elections experts told The Times this week.
Trump did not mention Russia, which has made attempts to influence U.S. elections through social media or disinformation. In 2016, Russia interfered in the presidential election in an attempt to sway the contest in Trump’s favor, multiple U.S. assessments found in the years following the election.
China was not found to have interfered with election processes or infrastructure in an intelligence report released in March 2021, and the information Trump provided Thursday did not appear to contradict that.
The idea that China may have attempted to influence voters via social media or public statements is not new. In April 2020, an intelligence assessment determined that Chinese intelligence officials analyzed voter registration data from multiple states, according to a report that was declassified in 2022.
After the 2020 election, whether China attempted influence was the subject of debate. The intelligence report concluded it had only considered trying to influence voters, but the national intelligence officer for cyber issues took a “minority view” in the report, assessing that China took “at least some steps to undermine” Trump’s reelection chance.
“Trump’s shocking ‘bombshells’ about China are totally bogus,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on X. “The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election.”
Obtaining a list of voter data alone does not enable someone to change votes, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. The data are largely public and often used by campaigns and researchers; a bad actor would have to take further steps to affect an election.
“If anyone got into our voter databases and altered data on a scale that could change the election outcome, it would be obvious … because we would get reports of tens or hundreds of thousands of people having trouble voting,” Becker said.
The president also used the address to pressure Republican lawmakers to pass a voter ID law that has stalled in Congress and that voting rights advocates have warned could make it harder for millions of Americans to register to vote or cast a ballot. Democrats oppose the legislation, but it also has not gained enough support among Senate Republicans to pass.
“Addressing this crisis of elections security demands that Congress will pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is that to do? Unless you want to cheat.”
Some congressional Republicans praised Trump on social media and echoed his claims to pass the legislation.
“It is more important than ever to crush foreign election interference,” Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said on X. “It is more important than ever to pass the SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
Ahead of the speech, elections and democracy experts had cautioned that the president may attempt to sow doubt about the security of the nation’s election system or bolster debunked fraud claims.
Some experts said Thursday’s address could be interpreted as a sign that Trump is running out of moves in the lead-up to the midterm elections, where Republican control of the House is at stake.
“The fact that they’re throwing everything up on the walls at this point demonstrates panic,” Becker said. “They are not operating from strength right now. They are operating from weakness.”
President Trump, a former real estate mogul who knows a few things about construction projects, says there is “no harder zoning thing to get” than a helipad. But he is building one at the White House, and building it fast.
Such projects usually require a developer to navigate a complex web of zoning laws, airspace regulations and environmental impact studies, while negotiating with town councils and fighting off community pushback. Construction at the White House can often face additional hurdles.
But Mr. Trump has encountered no such difficulties as he quickly proceeds with construction of a black granite helipad on the South Lawn. He has not asked Congress or any review panel, such as the Commission of Fine Arts, to approve the project.
Past presidents have involved Congress and review panels in changes to the White House grounds, though Mr. Trump has asserted that he has the right to undertake major construction projects, such as a new 90,000-square-foot ballroom, without congressional approval. That project is currently the subject of litigation.
A White House spokesman said in an email that “operational upgrades to the White House grounds, such as the helipad installation, do not require commission reviews.”
Work on the helipad — which will be 100 feet in diameter and feature a presidential seal — started last month, shortly after a makeshift stadium built to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight significantly damaged the South Lawn.
Dana White, the U.F.C. president, said that his organization had set aside $700,000 to repair the lawn after the June 14 event. But Mr. Trump instead decided to forge ahead immediately with a helipad he had long wanted.
Why Trump is building a helipad
The helipad would allow Mr. Trump to use the latest generation of Sikorsky helicopters as Marine One on White House grounds — a move multiple administrations had avoided because the new, more powerful helicopters were likely to damage the South Lawn during landing.
The Navy began the search in 2010 for helicopters to replace the two models that have been used to transport the president and vice president for more than four decades — the VH-3D and the VH-60N. It purchased 23 VH-92A helicopters, including two test aircraft, at about $215 million apiece, with a total cost estimated at $5 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The new helicopters are produced by Sikorsky, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, which is building the helipad as a donation. They joined the fleet between 2014 and 2021 and underwent a period of testing. The new generation of helicopters has occasionally been known to scorch the grass with engine exhaust while landing — an issue found during a training session in September 2018.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was the first president to fly on a VH-92A, on his way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 2024. But no new helicopter has yet transported a president to and from the South Lawn.
Marine One landed on the South Lawn grass for decades, and portable aluminum pads were rolled out to catch the wheels.
Mr. Trump said the new helicopters were “more powerful than the old ones. And when you land on the grass, it’s not that the grass gets discolored, it gets ripped out.”
The VH-92A has two engines with more than three times the capacity of those of the VH-3D, the current Marine One model, pushing more heat to the ground.
Lockheed Martin, a major defense contractor, is paying for the helipad project, which Mr. Trump estimated would cost between $5 million and $6 million.
“They didn’t tell us how powerful these helicopters were, and they felt a little bit guilty,” Mr. Trump said.
According to a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin, the company has a “long history of supporting projects in both the Washington, D.C., area and across the country. This specific contribution was made to the National Park Service. Our engagement with the federal government is guided by rigorous ethics and compliance standards and conducted in full accordance with all applicable laws and regulations.”
More red tape for a Mar-a-Lago helipad
Mr. Trump is also trying to build a helipad at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. But that project is moving much more slowly than the one at the White House.
The Mar-a-Lago project has been the subject of local historic preservation commission review, multiple public hearings, negotiations with town lawyers and votes by the Town Council.
Because Mar-a-Lago is a historic property, any changes there must be approved by the Palm Beach Landmarks Preservation Commission, said Joanne O’Connor, the town attorney for Palm Beach.
Mr. Trump had installed a helipad at the resort during his first administration, but it was dismantled after he left office.
The town is allowing Mr. Trump to build a new helipad at Mar-a-Lago but has placed limits on its use after his presidency. Any helicopter trips to or from Mar-a-Lago after he leaves office can be carried out only if approved by the Secret Service and in the event of an emergency, Ms. O’Connor said. The helipad cannot be used, for instance, to facilitate a golf outing.
“The concern was balancing the health, safety and welfare of the president with the interests of the town residents and the quiet enjoyment of their residential property,” Ms. O’Connor said.
No such review is taking place for the changes Mr. Trump is making at the White House.
Mr. Trump spoke recently about the difficulty most people encounter when trying to have helipads approved at their properties.
“I always was lucky, I always got helipads,” he said in remarks from the Oval Office. “Other people don’t. Very hard to get. The hardest thing to get is a helipad, OK?”
The South Lawn’s future
The helipad would significantly reshape the South Lawn, which has historically hosted events and ceremonies, including the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
A White House official said events on the South Lawn would not be affected by the new helipad and would continue as usual.
“It can be used for other things when helicopters aren’t landing,” Mr. Trump said this month. “You can have other things out there like events. You could have news conferences literally on it because it’s the right size. So by doing this, we solved the problem, and we’ll be able to finally retire 45-year-old helicopters.”
Previous administrations have prioritized preservation of the White House property over permanent changes to the South Lawn. During the Biden administration, building a helipad was not high on the president’s priority list, said Andrew Bates, who served as a White House spokesman.
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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche came out swinging against Sen. Adam Schiff on Wednesday, denying allegations of self-dealing and intentional refusal-to-recuse in President Donald Trump’s cases, while accusing the California Democrat of lying.
Schiff sparred with Blanche over several legal matters he said prove the nominee is unfit for the job of America’s top law enforcement officer, citing what he described as serious conflicts of interest. Blanche denied the allegations while telling Schiff he was misstating ethics rules and botching key timelines.
Schiff pressed Blanche on whether he met with Justice Department ethics lawyers about his prior representation of Trump in the Stormy Daniels, Mar-a-Lago classified documents, and Jan. 6 cases.
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Sen. Adam Schiff, left, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. (Al Drago/Getty Images; Eric Lee/Getty Images)
Blanche affirmed and said he has recused himself from future litigation or Justice Department business involving any of those suits. But Schiff countered that Blanche reportedly told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that there was no conflict of interest in the Justice Department firing prosecutors linked to Jan. 6 or other cases.
Blanche soon fired back when Schiff criticized him for moving to vacate Jan. 6-related convictions for 12 members of far-right groups.
“I was the acting attorney general – so yes, my department moved to dismiss,” he said, adding that there was no reason for him to recuse himself when Schiff pressed him further.
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“From the Proud Boys matter?” Blanche responded with a puzzled look.
“You’re a lawyer, you know the rules,” Blanche told the Massachusetts-born graduate of Harvard Law.
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“There are rules that say when I have to recuse and that’s not one of them,” Blanche said.
“There are rules,” Schiff agreed. “And when you’re told to recuse yourself from investigations that you handle for the president…” – “I always do,” Blanche cut in – “you’re supposed to recuse yourself,” Schiff finished.
Schiff noted that the second volume of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on Trump has not been released and said the Justice Department has opposed making it available.
Blanche denied having anything to do with the decision and pointed out it is not the Justice Department, but a federal judge in Miami, that has prohibited its release.
“If you went into court asking them to release it, it would be released by now,” Schiff argued.
Blanche shot back: “What you’re saying happens not to be true – I did not do that.”
“You can’t accuse me of violating my ethical rules and then lie about what I did,” he continued,
Schiff asked Blanche at length what allegedly evolved in his professional life that led him to be under such criticisms.
“What I don’t understand, Todd Blanche, is what happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York? What happened to the prosecutor people had respect for,” he said.
“What happened to the prosecutor who said that there wouldn’t be a whiff of political partisanship and then prosecutes the president’s enemies over seashells cases, over making a video stating the plain law in the Constitution?” Schiff said – appearing to reference investigations into former FBI Director Jim Comey’s “8647” post that critics said amounted to a threat on Trump’s life.
“I think Robert Caro had it right when he said that power doesn’t corrupt as much as it reveals. I suspect it has just revealed who you are and who you are as someone willing to sacrifice everything you once believed in for that title, for that position of attorney general,” Schiff claimed.
“I am still here. I am the same exact person I was when I was a federal prosecutor in the SDNY,” Blanche replied.
The exchange led to further criticism of Schiff, including from the Trump-appointed prosecutor in his home region:
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“Facts are not Senator Schiff’s strong suit,” claimed First Assistant U.S. Attorney for Central California Bill Essayli.
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Former Alabama federal prosecutor Jay Town called the exchange “excellent.”
“What [Blanche] is essentially saying is that the Justice Department has gone back to the fundamentals of increasing prosecutions and lowering crime nationwide, unlike the Garland DOJ targeting parents, Catholics, etc.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Schiff for comment.
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