Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Stocks Have Worst Day of 2025 as Economic Fears Grow
Where Things Stand
Stocks fall again: Wall Street had its worst day of 2025 on Monday, with the S&P 500 index falling 2.7 percent a day after President Trump refused to rule out that his aggressive trade policies could cause a recession. The sell-off came as the Canadian province of Ontario put in place retaliatory surcharges on energy it exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York, and as Mr. Trump’s trade war with China intensified with Beijing responding to his tariffs by imposing levies on American farm products.
Ukraine talks: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Ukraine would have to concede at least some of the territory seized by Russia in a deal to end their three-year war. Mr. Rubio — who is set to meet Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, a little more than a week after a contentious meeting between Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine — said future meetings with Russian officials would be crucial to determining what Moscow would be willing to give up in a peace agreement. Read more ›
Public niceties: Days after an ugly confrontation at the White House, Mr. Rubio and Elon Musk tried to smooth over their tensions with an awkward social media exchange, as Mr. Rubio formalized drastic cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development that Mr. Musk had demanded. Read more ›
Danielle KayeEshe Nelson and Joe Rennison
Eshe Nelson reported from London, and Danielle Kaye and Joe Rennison from New York.
Wall Street suffered its steepest decline of the year on Monday, a drop fueled by angst about the economy a day after President Trump refused to rule out the possibility that his policies could trigger a recession.
The S&P 500 slid 2.7 percent, the worst daily fall in an already three-week-long stretch of selling. The index is now roughly 9 percent below a record set last month, and approaching a “correction,” a Wall Street term for a decline of 10 percent or more from a recent high.
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened, imposed, suspended and resumed tariffs on America’s largest trade partners: Canada, Mexico and China. The dizzying shifts, including last-minute exemptions for some automakers and energy products, have unnerved investors.
“The market volatility is much less about the bad news of tariffs and much more about the uncertainty of tariffs, especially uncertainty as to what the policy is, where it is headed, how long it will last and what the end result will be,” said David Bahnsen, the chief investment officer at the Bahnsen Group.
S&P 500
In a Fox News interview that aired on Sunday, Mr. Trump was asked about “rising worries about a slowdown,” by the host, Maria Bartiromo. He described what might follow as “a period of transition,” and didn’t rule out the possibility that his policies would cause a recession. Asked during the interview when businesses might have clarity on the on-again, off-again tariff policies, Mr. Trump responded by suggesting that more tariffs could come.
“We may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, or we may go up,” he said. “They have plenty of clarity.”
On Monday, retaliatory tariffs by China on U.S. agricultural products came into effect. On Wednesday, the Trump administration is set to put in place a 25 percent tariff on all U.S. steel and aluminum imports. Mr. Trump has also threatened to impose “reciprocal tariffs” on all U.S. imports to match other countries’ tariffs and trading policies next month.
The S&P 500 has now erased all the gains it made since Election Day. The Nasdaq has been hit even harder, as a rally in big tech stocks driven by enthusiasm for artificial intelligence reversed course. The index fell into a correction last week, and dropped a further 4 percent on Monday.
“There’s just no support in the tech stocks right now,” said Larry Tentarelli, the chief technical strategist at Blue Chip Daily Trend Report.
Many tech companies have grown so large that movements in their stocks have an outsize influence on the broader market. On Monday, several of the biggest companies were down sharply: Tesla plunged more than 15 percent, adding to a losing streak that’s come amid falling sales and as investors worry that its chief executive, Elon Musk, has been distracted by his role in the Trump administration. Alphabet, Apple and Nvidia each fell more than 4 percent.
Stocks in Europe and Asia were also under pressure, but the declines paled in comparison with losses on Wall Street. An index tracking the eurozone’s largest public companies, which hit a record last week, dropped 1.3 percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index fell 1.9 percent.
Investors seeking havens continued to opt for the relative safety of bonds, pushing down the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield to 4.22 percent; bond prices move inversely to yields. The combination of falling stocks and declining interest rates is often seen as a sign of economic unease. Oil prices also fell, another signal of concern about the broader economy.
Those worries are also reflected by traders’ bets that the Federal Reserve will resume cutting the rate it controls, pricing in three or more such cuts this year, according to CME FedWatch. Stock investors generally embrace rate reductions, which lower the cost of borrowing for businesses and consumers, but not when they are spurred by concerns about the economy.
Monday’s losses were Wall Street’s worst since December, when the Federal Reserve dialed down expectations for interest rate cuts in response to the continued strength of the U.S. economy. As in previous rounds of selling, stocks did eventually recover their footing as concerns about the economy eased and lower market valuations drew in bargain seekers.
By most measures, the U.S. economy is still in good shape. On Friday, the latest data on hiring showed that employers continue to add workers at a healthy pace.
But economists have turned gloomier as they come to grips with Mr. Trump’s seesawing approach to tariffs, which has hamstrung businesses trying to plan investments and hiring. Cuts to the federal work force and government spending freezes have also dented consumer sentiment.
“The markets are scared of the uncertainty that the tariff rhetoric is bringing,” said Andrew Brenner, head of international fixed income at National Alliance Securities.
A report on inflation due this week will be closely watched, as surveys of consumers suggest that they expect price increases to pick up, a potentially worrying sign for the Fed as it tries to bring inflation down further. The rising cost of eggs and other necessities has squeezed shoppers’ wallets, and tariffs and mass deportations could push prices higher.
Given a murkier outlook for the American economy, “the recent moves might well have further to go,” Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, said in a note on Monday. Strategists at the bank recently increased the chances of a U.S. recession in the coming year to 20 percent.
Analysts at JPMorgan Chase warned in a report that the spillover from a possible U.S. slowdown has resulted in a “materially higher risk of a global recession this year due to extreme U.S. policies.” They put the probability of such a downturn at 40 percent.
Reporting from Washington
Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and one of President Trump’s top advisers, on Monday accused Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, of being a “traitor” after he visited Ukraine and said the United States should keep supporting its war against Russia.
Mr. Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and Navy pilot who flew combat missions during Operation Desert Storm, visited Ukraine over the weekend, meeting with members of the Ukrainian military, nurses and others, concluding in a social media post that what he saw “proved to me we can’t give up on the Ukrainian people.”
In reply, Mr. Musk wrote: “You are a traitor.”
And with that, one of the president’s powerful supporters equated a policy disagreement with one of the most serious crimes against the United States.
On Monday, Mr. Kelly hit back at Mr. Musk.
“Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do,” he wrote on X, which Mr. Musk owns.
Their public spat comes less than two weeks after Mr. Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office, telling him that he had not been grateful enough for U.S. support in its war against Russia’s invasion and seeking to pressure him into making a peace deal on U.S.-dictated terms.
Mr. Kelly’s original posts also directly accused President Trump of “trying to weaken Ukraine’s hand” in his pursuit of a peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. On Monday, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said Ukraine would have to be willing to give up territory in any peace deal with Russia.
Mr. Trump’s antagonism toward Ukraine while bolstering Russia has been criticized by Democrats as well as some Republicans. During the Biden administration, members of both parties in Congress approved sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine as it fought Russia’s invasion.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Kelly have butted heads before, though Mr. Kelly once served as a member of an independent safety advisory panel for SpaceX, another company owned by Mr. Musk.
In February, Mr. Musk said during a joint interview with Mr. Trump on Fox News’s Sean Hannity Show that NASA astronauts had been left stuck aboard the International Space Station “for political reasons.” Mr. Musk also called Mr. Kelly a “Dem donor shill” in a post criticizing him, his twin brother, Scott Kelly — also a former astronaut who once commanded the International Space Station — and Andreas Mogensen, a Danish astronaut who had also criticized Mr. Musk’s comments.
“Hey @ElonMusk, when you finally get the nerve to climb into a rocket ship, come talk to the three of us,” Mr. Kelly retorted.
Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.
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NASA is eliminating its chief scientist and other roles as part of efforts by the Trump administration to pare back staff at the agency’s Washington headquarters.
The cuts affect about 20 employees at NASA, including Katherine Calvin, the chief scientist and a climate science expert. The last day of work for Dr. Calvin and the other staff members will be April 10.
That could be a harbinger of deeper cuts to NASA’s science missions and a greater emphasis on human spaceflight, especially to Mars. During President Trump’s address to Congress last week, he said, “We are going to lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond.”
Mr. Trump did not give a timeline for astronauts to reach the red planet, and during an interview on Fox News on Sunday, he said it was not a top priority. “Is it No. 1 on my hit list?” he said. “No. It’s not really.”
He added, “It’d be a great achievement.”
The administration sent notice to Congress on Monday that NASA was abolishing the Office of the Chief Scientist and the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy.
“This is shortsighted and hugely alarming,” Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the ranking member on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, said in a statement. “Trump’s assault on science continues. If you wanted a playbook on how to lose to China in every technological race, this is it.”
Bhavya Lal, who served as the associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy when the office was created in 2021, said the purpose of the office was to provide “rigorous, quick-turn, data-driven and objective analysis to decision makers at NASA and the White House” on issues that often cut across federal agencies.
The issues included the economics of removing space debris and shaping how future activities on the moon would be governed. The work of the office “wasn’t just about getting to the moon,” Dr. Lal said. “It was about laying the groundwork for sustainable lunar exploration.”
The office also “made sure that NASA’s push for innovation was balanced with thoughtful consideration of its long-term impacts,” she said.
The eliminated positions include the chief technologist and chief economist for the agency, which were part of the technology, policy and strategy office. Chief technologist positions at NASA centers like the Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are not affected, the notice said.
The agency is also cutting several positions related to diversity, equity and inclusion in its Office of Equal Opportunity.
The notice said that NASA estimated severance costs would be about $1.2 million.
“To optimize our work force, and in compliance with an executive order, NASA is beginning its phased approach to a reduction in force, known as a RIF,” Cheryl Wheeler, a NASA spokeswoman, said in an email. “A small number of individuals received notification Monday they are a part of NASA’s RIF.”
Eligible employees could opt for early retirement, Ms. Wheeler said.
The Democratic House staff members said they worried deeper cuts at NASA would follow.
Last week, the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that promotes space exploration, raised alarms that the Trump administration could be considering slashing the budget for NASA’s science activities by half.
The job eliminations announced on Monday “are more symbolic, and certainly less impactful than some of the other numbers we’re hearing for budget or further RIFs,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the society, said in an email.
Dr. Calvin was appointed as NASA’s chief scientist in January 2022. Since 2008, she has been a researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Joint Global Change Research Institute in College Park, Md. In 2023, she was named a chair of a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that supplies scientific information to governments as they work on national climate policies.
The role of the chief scientist has been to advise the NASA administrator and other top officials on strategic planning. Dr. Calvin is the agency’s 11th chief scientist since 1982. The position was previously eliminated in 2005 during the presidency of George W. Bush and was recreated in 2011 when Barack Obama was president.
The chief scientist position is separate from that of the associate administrator who runs NASA’s science mission directorate, Nicola Fox.
Elon Musk, in an interview on Fox Business, says his team at the Department of Government Efficiency is “a little over 100 at this point” and that they will “get to 200.” Asked if DOGE was embedded in every department at this point, Musk replied “pretty much, yeah.”
Musk reiterated that he believes his cost-cutting effort will lead to $1 trillion in savings, “unless we’re stopped.” Musk was asked by the interviewer, Larry Kudlow, if he was “going to go another year,” a reference to the DOGE project’s targeted end date of mid-2026. “Yeah, I think so.” He told Kudlow earlier: “I can’t believe I’m here doing this. It’s kind of bizarre.”
Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, said on social media today that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was no longer receiving intelligence briefings. She also announced that she had revoked the security clearances of several Biden administration officials and law enforcement figures.
That group, Gabbard said, includes Antony J. Blinken, the former secretary of state, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, both of whom have brought cases against him. Last month, the White House confirmed that Trump had ordered the revocations of the security clearances, part of a campaign of retribution against those who had participated in high-profile legal cases or were perceived political rivals.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTElon Musk is alleging that today’s outages on X are due to “a massive cyber attack” that had “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” Musk did not present evidence for that claim in his interview with Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, and added that he’s “not sure exactly what happened.” Musk, who has been a critic of Ukraine’s role in the war started by Russia, has blamed glitches on X on cybercriminals before. After a live audio conversation last year between him and President Trump was marred by outages and technical problems, Musk said, without providing evidence, that cyber attacks were to blame.
Edward WongCharlie SavageHamed Aleaziz and Luis Ferré-Sadurní
Reporting from Washington and New York
The Trump administration invoked an obscure legal statute over the weekend in an attempt to deport a recent Columbia University graduate and lawful permanent resident of the United States who helped lead campus protests against Israel last year, people with knowledge of the action said on Monday.
Mahmoud Khalil, 30, who graduated in December from Columbia with a master’s degree from the School of International and Public Affairs, was arrested by immigration officers in New York on Saturday and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. Mr. Khalil, who has Palestinian heritage, holds a green card and is married to an American citizen who is eight months pregnant.
President Trump said Mr. Khalil’s case was “the first arrest of many to come.”
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Mr. Trump said on social media on Monday.
“If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply,” he added.
The arrest and attempted expulsion of Mr. Khalil by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, has provoked alarm over free-speech rights and the Trump administration’s escalating crackdown on immigration and on universities that Mr. Trump and his aides argue are too liberal.
The administration did not publicly lay out the legal authority for the arrest. But two people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio relied on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that gives him sweeping power to expel foreigners.
That provision says any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
Mr. Rubio also reposted a Homeland Security Department statement that accused Mr. Khalil of having “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it.
Rather, the rationale is that the anti-Israel protests Mr. Khalil helped lead were antisemitic and fostered a hostile environment for Jewish students at Columbia, the people with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Rubio’s argument is that the United States has a foreign policy of combating antisemitism around the world and that it would undermine this policy objective to tolerate Mr. Khalil’s continued presence in the United States, they said.
“We haven’t seen anything like this as far as I’ve been a practicing attorney,” said Robyn Barnard, an immigration lawyer at Human Rights First. “It’s just really deeply concerning to see the U.S. government deciding to use their limited resources in terms of enforcement of immigration laws to target someone whose speech they just disagree with, but otherwise doesn’t seem to violate our First Amendment.”
Mr. Trump has taken measures to try to suppress protests and other activities on campuses that officials in his administration consider anti-Israel or antisemitic, often conflating the two. On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million of grants and contracts with Columbia, citing “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”
While a student at Columbia, Mr. Khalil was a leader of campus protests that broke out after Hamas launched an assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping about 250 others. The Israeli military carried out strikes in Gaza that have killed nearly 50,000 Palestinians, according to health officials there.
Pro-Palestinian protests and a student encampment at Columbia — as well as the university administration’s response, which included asking the police to clear out protesters — became a lightning rod in national debates over public criticism of Israel. Some protesters adopted slogans like “globalize the intifada” and called for freeing Palestine “from the river to the sea,” a phrase that has radically different interpretations by Israelis and Palestinians and which led to accusations of antisemitism.
The State Department declined to comment on Monday. The Department of Homeland Security referred questions to the State Department.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump previewed that he intended to expel foreign students who participated in anti-Israel protests as part of his broader plans for a sweeping crackdown on immigration. He generally framed that plan in terms of canceling student visas, however — not expelling lawful permanent residents.
A lawful permanent resident, or green-card holder, is protected by the Constitution, which includes First Amendment free-speech rights and Fifth Amendment due-process rights. The Trump administration’s attempt to expel Mr. Khalil under that statutory provision is very likely to face a constitutional challenge, several legal experts said.
Amy Belsher, the director of immigrants’ rights litigation at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said she could not recall any previous instances in which a secretary of state had invoked that provision since Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act, or I.N.A., in 1952.
“It’s an escalation,” she said. “This provision has not been historically invoked and is incredibly vague and would raise real concerns about the weaponization of the I.N.A. to remove people who the administration just disagrees with.”
Because any prior use of the provision appears to have been rare at most, legal specialists were still sorting through what it would mean procedurally — including whether an immigration judge would need to formally revoke Mr. Khalil’s green card and issue a final removal order.
It was also not clear whether administrative removal proceedings, should they be a necessary first step, would delay the ability of Mr. Khalil’s lawyers to pursue a constitutional challenge in federal court. Mr. Khalil’s lawyers did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.
Nor was it clear whether any legal challenge to his detention and deportation proceedings would play out in New York, where he was arrested, or in Louisiana. The appeals court that oversees federal judicial proceedings in Louisiana is particularly conservative.
At a rally in Iowa on Oct. 16, 2023, Mr. Trump declared that, “in the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate.” He added: “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical, anti-American and anti-Semitic foreigners at our colleges and universities, and we will send them straight back home.”
At a speech in Las Vegas on Oct. 28, Mr. Trump said that “we’ll terminate the visas of all of those Hamas sympathizers, and we’ll get them off our college campuses, out of our cities and get them the hell out of our country.” And at a Nov. 8 campaign stop in Florida, he said he would “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism.”
On Monday, Mr. Rubio met in Jeddah with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in part to discuss efforts to end the war in Gaza. As a Republican senator representing Florida, Mr. Rubio was a vocal supporter of Israel in the war, telling one protester confronting him in the Capitol that the “vicious animals” of Hamas were to blame for all the devastation and civilian deaths from Israeli military strikes in Gaza.
Julian E. Barnes contributed reported from Washington.
Delta Air Lines cut its financial forecast for the first three months of the year, saying in a financial filing that economic uncertainty had weakened confidence among businesses and consumers. The airline still expects revenue to rise by at least 3 percent compared to the same period last year, but that was down from the minimum 7 percent increase it had projected two months earlier.
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Several of the biggest tech companies, whose stocks have an outsize influence on the broader market, fell sharply today. Tesla shares plunged more than 15 percent, adding to a losing streak that’s come as investors assess falling sales and worry that the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, has been distracted by his role in the Trump administration. Shares of Alphabet, Apple and Nvidia each tumbled more than 4 percent.
Ana Swanson covers international trade and reported from Washington.
As he prepares to introduce new tariffs on foreign metals this week, President Trump has vowed not to grant the types of exclusions and exemptions that were common during his first trade war.
But he has already undercut that tough position on other tariffs. After lobbying from automakers, farmers and other industries, Mr. Trump quickly walked back the sweeping tariffs he had imposed on Tuesday on all imports from Canada and Mexico. By Thursday, he had suspended those tariffs indefinitely for all products that comply with the North American free trade deal, U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A. — about half of all imports from Mexico and nearly 40 percent of those from Canada.
That has given industries and foreign governments an opening to lobby the administration ahead of the metals tariffs, which go into effect at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, as well as other levies planned for April 2.
Foreign officials have been pressing for exemptions for their steel and aluminum. In meetings in Washington on Monday, Japan’s trade minister was also expected to seek an exemption from tariffs on automobiles, which Mr. Trump has said are coming in April.
Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, a trade group representing U.S. automakers, said in a statement that Ford Motor, General Motors and Stellantis purchase the vast majority of their steel and aluminum in the United States or North America and were worried about the impact of the levies.
The companies were reviewing and awaiting details of the proposed tariffs, but were “concerned” that levying them on Canada and Mexico would “add significant costs for our suppliers,” Mr. Blunt said.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump will offer exceptions to the metal levies, or to future rounds of tariffs, like those on cars and other products he says are coming in April. But the allure of cutting a deal could be a tough thing for the president to resist. The ability to grant preferred industries or foreign governments relief highlights one of the president’s favorite thing about tariffs: the immediate influence they give him.
By threatening or imposing tariffs and then lifting them, the president has repeatedly placated companies and countries affected by tariffs, ingratiating them to him and inviting praise and compliance. Foreign countries have offered to begin trade negotiations and devoted resources to Mr. Trump’s goals, like strengthening U.S. borders. And that is a power the president may be loath to give up.
“This is what authoritarians do — manipulate public policy and control it with personal decisions and seemingly idiosyncratic decisions, often to get or push for political support in return,” said Rick McGahey, an economist at the New School.
Last week, the executives of General Motors, Stellantis and Ford told the president in a call that putting tariffs on cars and parts from Canada and Mexico could have devastating consequences, including imposing billions of dollars of new costs and, in effect, erasing all of their companies’ profits.
When Mr. Trump granted them a 30-day reprieve on Wednesday, they issued positive statements. G.M. thanked the president “for his approach, which enables American automakers like G.M. to compete and invest domestically.” Ford said it appreciated “President Trump’s work to support our industry.”
On Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance suggested that the exclusions wouldn’t go beyond automakers, saying that the president “wants tariffs to apply broadly.”
“He doesn’t want to have 500 different industries getting 500 different carve outs,” Mr. Vance argued.
But by Thursday, after a week of stock market turmoil, the president had issued a carve out for all goods trading under the terms of U.S.M.C.A., including agricultural products, and lowered the tariff on Canadian potash to 10 percent from 25 percent.
Pushback from farmers appeared to have played a role. State and national associations representing corn and soy farmers had expressed concern about the harm from tariffs on potash, a fertilizer imported from Canada. In town halls in Tennessee and Colorado organized by Farmers for Free Trade, a lobbying group, farmers and business owners complained that the tariffs could raise their prices and decrease their revenues.
In a statement, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said he appreciated “President Trump showing understanding for farmers by lowering the proposed tariffs on Canadian potash.”
While Republican objections to tariffs have been muted, lawmakers have been trying to convey the message that they won’t continue to stand back unless they see a plan for the tariffs to be removed, one person familiar with the discussions said.
The Trump administration has repeatedly indicated that it doesn’t intend to undermine its own measures with exclusions. In a call with reporters last month, a Trump official said such deals had undercut the effectiveness of metal tariffs.
The president has made similar promises in the case of copper tariffs — writing on social media that there would be “No exemptions, no exceptions!” — and on his “reciprocal tariff” plan. In the Oval Office last month, Mr. Trump said reciprocal tariffs would apply “to everybody across the board.”
“This is a much simpler way of doing it, a much better way,” the president said.
In his first term, Mr. Trump initially imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum from countries like China and Russia. But he did not put them on a select group of countries the United States imports most of its metal from, instead inviting them to come and negotiate, said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute.
South Korea, Argentina and Brazil agreed to quotas that would limit their exports. Canada, Mexico, the European Union and others were hit with the tariffs and retaliated.
Canada and Mexico then negotiated their own bargains as part of the signing of U.S.M.C.A. under Mr. Trump. And when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. came into office, he forged deals with the European Union, the United Kingdom and Japan that gave them relief, Mr. Bown said.
It’s possible that Mr. Trump will hold the door open to his own personal deal making, but not set up a formal system of exclusions like in his first term. Back then, companies ended up applying for hundreds of thousands of tariff exemptions with the help of Washington’s high-priced K Street law firms.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which handled exclusions for the China tariffs, fielded more than 50,000 requests, while the Commerce Department received nearly 500,000 exclusion requests for the tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Some lawyers and companies say that exceptions are still badly needed, since not all the parts and raw materials they must use are produced within the United States.
But some of Mr. Trump’s supporters are continuing to fight against any exemptions that would dilute the power of tariffs.
Nick Iacovella, executive vice president at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, which supports tariffs, said the Trump administration “rightly recognizes that the global steel and aluminum tariffs must be comprehensive and include downstream derivative products to be effective.”
Analysis by that group had shown that past exemptions “severely weakened American steel and aluminum producers, costing thousands of jobs and undermining our economic security,” he said.
In a letter Monday, five steel organizations wrote to express their support for the tariffs and their opposition to any exclusions to them.
The exclusions process “has been exploited as a loophole by foreign producers seeking to avoid tariffs,” they wrote.
Jack Ewing contributed reporting.
The S&P 500 fell 2.7 percent today, its biggest daily drop since December, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq ended the day 4 percent lower. Angst about the health of the U.S. economy fueled the stock market decline, as investors continue to grapple with the Trump administration’s back-and-forth on tariffs and fears of a potential economic slowdown.
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Traveling with the secretary of state
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Monday that Ukraine would have to make concessions over land that Russia had taken since 2014 as part of any agreement to end the war.
Mr. Rubio spoke as he was flying to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for talks with senior Ukrainian officials, and 10 days after a contentious White House meeting between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. The Trump administration halted military aid to Ukraine after the blowup, which centered on Mr. Trump’s refusal to include any security guarantees in a proposed deal involving Ukraine’s natural resources.
“The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things to end this conflict or at least pause it in some way, shape or form,” Mr. Rubio told reporters.
Mr. Rubio declined to offer the outline of a potential agreement but made clear that concessions by both sides would be central to diplomacy.
“I think both sides need to come to an understanding that there’s no military solution to this situation,” Mr. Rubio said. “The Russians can’t conquer all of Ukraine, and obviously it’ll be very difficult for Ukraine in any reasonable time period to sort of force the Russians back all the way to where they were in 2014.”
Mr. Rubio added that it would be imperative in future talks with Moscow to determine what Russia was willing to concede.
“We don’t know how far apart they truly are,” Mr. Rubio said.
The talks on Tuesday likely will not delve into the proposed agreement on Ukrainian natural resources that Mr. Trump had described as compensation for U.S. military support during the three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion. He has said that an American financial interest in Ukrainian fossil fuels and rare-earth minerals would provide Ukraine with implied security.
Although the United States has stopped sharing some intelligence with Ukraine, including satellite imagery, Mr. Rubio said it was still providing Kyiv with information that allowed it to continue defending itself against Russian attacks. He also said that there had never been a threat of removing Ukraine’s access to Starlink, the internet service company owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Even as the United States has been pressuring Ukraine in recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also threatened to impose additional sanctions on Russia in response to Moscow’s continued military activity. Mr. Rubio said that the United States was trying to demonstrate that it still had ways to coerce Russia in an effort to bring it to the negotiating table with Ukraine.
Mr. Rubio said he and Ukrainian officials would most likely discuss the resumption of military assistance during the meetings on Tuesday. He said the U.S. position on the issue could change if he believed that Ukraine was seriously committed to peace.
“I can assure you this, we will not be providing military aid to the Russians,” Mr. Rubio said.
Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, spoke by phone with President Trump ahead of talks between the U.S. and Ukraine in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday on the war in Ukraine, with Starmer saying he hoped discussions would yield a positive result, according to Downing Street.
Starmer said in a statement released on Monday that he had told President Trump British officials “had been speaking to Ukraine officials over the weekend and they remain committed to a lasting peace.” The statement added, “The prime minister said he hoped there would be a positive outcome to the talks that would enable U.S. aid and intelligence sharing to be restarted.”
Earlier on Monday, Starmer’s office announced that he planned to host a virtual meeting of world leaders to discuss Ukraine on Saturday, building on a summit in London this month which discussed forming a “coalition of the willing” to help in the event of a peace deal.
Perkins Coie, the law firm that President Trump targeted for punishment with an executive order last week for its role representing Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, has hired an elite Washington firm, Williams & Connolly, to fight the order, according to four people briefed on the matter.
The decision to hire Williams & Connolly — which is considered among the most aggressive and skilled firms in fighting the federal government — marked a significant escalation in the fight between Perkins Coie and Mr. Trump.
There were concerns in the legal community that no firm would step forward to represent Perkins Coie. But now Mr. Trump’s Justice Department will be forced to face off against some of the top litigators in the country to defend what legal experts consider one of his most direct attacks on his perceived enemies, and the American legal system.
The executive order Mr. Trump signed on Thursday essentially crippled Perkins Coie’s ability to represent clients dealing with the federal government by stripping it of access to government buildings and officials. The president said he was taking the action, in part, because of Perkins Coie’s role in hiring another firm that helped create a dossier on Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.
A spokesman for Perkins Coie, which is based in Seattle but has a large Washington office, declined to comment. Emails sent to Williams & Connolly were not answered.
Legal experts and top Washington lawyers said the order targeting Perkins Coie was among Mr. Trump’s most troubling maneuvers since returning to office. Not only did it appear designed to destroy the firm, they said, it seemed intended to have a chilling effect on the entire legal profession, signaling that firms could face major consequences for simply representing an adversary of Mr. Trump.
The lawyer who served as Perkins Coie’s point person on the Russia dossier, Marc Elias, ran the firm’s political law group and served as the top lawyer for the Clinton campaign. He left the firm in 2021 to start his own firm specializing in election and voting rights law, taking with him dozens of Perkins Coie lawyers and becoming even more vocal in his criticisms of Mr. Trump.
While Perkins Coie maintained its political law practice, that is dwarfed by its work representing major corporations that generally seek to avoid political controversies of the sort generated by the dossier and Mr. Trump’s attacks.
In the hours after Mr. Trump signed the order, top Perkins Coie lawyers hurriedly strategized about how to respond, according to three of the people. Several other firms declined to represent Perkins Coie, fearing that they, too, could become targets of Mr. Trump’s ire, according to three of those briefed on the matter. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be publicly identified speaking about confidential discussions.
Williams & Connolly has a mixed political pedigree. One of its top partners, David E. Kendall, is the longtime lawyer for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Kendall handled the congressional and Justice Department investigations into her use of a personal email account when she was secretary of state.
Another of the firm’s most prominent partners, Emmet Flood, was one of Mr. Trump’s top White House lawyers during his first term. Mr. Flood went on to represent Vice President Mike Pence in connection with the Justice Department investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election; that case eventually resulted in Mr. Trump’s being indicted.
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Harvard University, one of the nation’s wealthiest schools, on Monday joined the list of universities across the country imposing hiring freezes, citing the uncertainty created by President Trump’s threats to slash funding for higher education.
The move was announced in an email to the school community by Dr. Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president.
The announcement comes three days after the Trump administration pulled $400 million in grants and contracts from Columbia University over accusations that the school had failed to protect Jewish students and faculty from antisemitism.
A number of other universities have announced hiring freezes or “chills” in the past month in response to potential policy changes of the Trump administration. But the step by Harvard, which has an endowment of more than $50 billion, illustrates the gravity of the situation facing higher education as the Trump administration continues its crusade against colleges and universities.
Harvard, like Columbia, is one of 10 schools the Trump administration identified last month as subject to review over accusations that it had not done enough to curb antisemitic behavior on campus during protests over the war in Gaza.
In a similar move Monday, the University of Pennsylvania — which is not among the 10 schools the Trump administration identified last month — announced a freeze on staff hiring. It also announced a review of faculty hiring, citing changes to federal research funding, including “stop-work” orders that Penn already received.
“The direction is clear, and we are already experiencing reduced funding,” said the announcement, in an email to Penn staff by two university administrators.
In addition to issuing a freeze on staff hiring, with some exceptions, the university said it was freezing some raises and reducing other expenses by 5 percent. Those freezes come after funding cuts prompted some departments at Penn to retract verbal admission offers to incoming Ph.D. students.
Campuses have been embroiled in debates over whether the protests against Israel constitute antisemitism. While many such demonstrations have been peaceful, some episodes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators and counterprotesters supporting Israel have deteriorated into violence. Many of the protesters themselves are Jewish, and activists, political leaders and university officials have debated what, precisely, constitutes antisemitism.
Issuing claims of antisemitism, which could violate federal law, is just one of the methods the Trump administration is trying in an effort to hobble funding of higher education.
Other methods include threatening to increase taxes on large university endowments, cutting overhead reimbursements for federal grants and promising to target schools that allow diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Dr. Garber’s email, which was posted to the university’s website, did not mention Mr. Trump by name, but said that universities through the nation “face substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.”
“Effective immediately, Harvard will implement a temporary pause on staff and faculty hiring across the University,” the email said. It was also signed by other top members of Harvard’s administration.
The email emphasized that the hiring pause was temporary, but also asked the leadership of Harvard units to “scrutinize discretionary and nonsalary spending.”
President Trump celebrated the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the activist who played a leading role in Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian student protests last year, writing on Truth Social that this was “first arrest of many to come.” Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was detained by immigration agents on Saturday in New York.
“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump wrote.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs have downgraded their forecast for U.S. economic growth this year to 1.7 percent, from 2.4 percent a few months ago. “Our trade policy assumptions have become considerably more adverse,” chief economist Jan Hatzius said in a note on Monday, stressing that tariff-induced concerns prompted the revision — not recent economic data.
The U.S. stock market has stumbled in recent weeks, including a large decline on Monday, underperforming markets elsewhere in the world. Given the murkier outlook for the economy, “the recent moves might well have further to go,” he wrote.
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Reporting from Toronto
Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, retaliated against President Trump’s economic threats on Monday by imposing a 25 percent surcharge on the electricity that it exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York.
The move will cost businesses and residents in each state up to $400,000 per day, and lift the average energy bill by about $100 per month, Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference. The province exports enough energy to power about 1.5 million homes and businesses in those states, he added. They went into effect on Monday.
President Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on Canadian exports last Tuesday, but then on Thursday decided to suspend most of them for 30 days as part of his on-again, off-again use of economic weapons against various countries.
Mr. Ford said he would continue to leverage the province’s key exports to the United States and exert “maximum pressure,” warning he would shut off the supply of electricity completely if the Trump administration does not back down on tariffs.
“Until these tariffs are off the table, until the threat of tariffs is gone for good, we will not relent,” Mr. Ford said. “Pausing some tariffs, making last-minute exemptions, it won’t cut it. We need to end the chaos once and for all.”
“Minnesota cannot afford Trump’s billionaire-run economy,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said in a post on X, calling the residents of his state the “first victims of Trump’s trade war.”
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which runs the regional electric grid in parts of 15 states including Minnesota and Michigan, said in a statement that it expected minimal effects from the surcharge. The operator imported less than 1 percent of its total energy from Canada last year.
The New York Independent System Operator, the nonprofit corporation that manages the state’s electricity, said in a statement that it was analyzing the effects of the surcharge. The operator had previously expressed concerns that the measures could disrupt energy flows between the highly integrated systems and cost the state tens of millions of dollars per year.
In 2023, New York imported a net 3,976 gigawatt hours from Ontario, according to a 2024 report from the operator, representing almost 3 percent of the total energy usage across its bulk electric system.
Mr. Ford has been a leading politician in Canada’s battle against Mr. Trump, taking other actions such as removing American alcohol products from government-run liquor stores.
Reporting from Washington
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire deputized by President Trump to slash federal spending, sought to smooth over their ugly confrontation in the White House last week with an awkward social media embrace on Monday, as Mr. Rubio formalized deep cuts to foreign aid that Mr. Musk had demanded.
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Musk clashed during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House last Thursday, in which the world’s richest man jeered the secretary of state for failing to make more sweeping staffing cuts to the agencies under his purview. In the same meeting, Mr. Rubio bristled at how Mr. Musk had undercut his leadership to flatten the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s lead agency for distributing foreign aid.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio thanked Mr. Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency for aiding in making the drastic cuts he had resisted, and announced that the agency’s remaining work would be subsumed under the State Department.
Mr. Rubio wrote on his personal account on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk, that 83 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s programs were being cut. “The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” he added.
Mr. Musk replied: “Tough, but necessary. Good working with you.”
During the meeting last week, Mr. Trump defended Mr. Rubio for doing a “great job” and decreed that Mr. Musk’s team would be merely advising Cabinet secretaries about future cuts. But Mr. Rubio’s apparent embrace of Mr. Musk’s objectives revealed the extent to which the billionaire Trump supporter wields power in the administration.
Mr. Rubio’s announcement appeared to be the official culmination of the process of culling foreign aid that had been underway for weeks, as Mr. Musk led the charge to greatly reduce the footprint of U.S.A.I.D., which manages about $42.5 billion in global assistance programs that represent less than 1 percent of the annual federal budget. The moves, which included canceling contracts, turning off payment systems, and laying off or forcing the vast majority of staff onto administrative leave, crippled the agency and left the global humanitarian aid industry that relied on the agency’s funding in limbo.
Mr. Trump had announced in an executive order on the first day of his presidency that he was instituting a 90-day pause on foreign aid, pending a review, to bring the United States’ foreign aid programs in line with his administration’s interests. But the cuts to U.S.A.I.D. prompted a series of lawsuits from the unions representing agency staff members and the organizations that were stiffed by the cuts.
One of those cases rose to the Supreme Court, which ruled last week that the administration had to comply with a lower court’s ruling to release the frozen funds — even though the Supreme Court did not specify exactly how much of the nearly $2 billion in contracts in question had to be restored.
The plaintiffs in several lawsuits, as well as other critics of the Trump administration’s maneuvers, have derided the moves as illegal, arguing that the law that created U.S.A.I.D. means that only Congress can significantly reduce its budget.
They have also argued that the cuts are shortsighted, and will lead to widespread human suffering and ultimately hurt U.S. national security.
Among the affected projects are those that deal with food security and famine warnings, agricultural efficiency, women’s health, L.G.B.T.Q. communities, and civil society and energy in war-torn Ukraine, according to a list of the canceled contracts shared with members of Congress last week, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times.
In recent days, some health-related groups — many of which help distribute H.I.V. medication — have had their funding restored.
The Trump administration has said in court filings that its review of programs was complete, but several organizations recently received questionnaires asking them to justify how their contracts lined up with U.S. interests. Deadlines for responding were as late as March 17.
Robert Jimison and Stephanie Nolen contributed reporting.
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Tesla shares plunged on Monday, hitting their lowest point since before Election Day, as investors registered the impact of falling sales and increasing protests over the high-profile political role that Elon Musk, the company’s chief executive, has taken on.
At the close of trading, the electric-car maker’s shares were down more than 15 percent for the day, and more than 50 percent from a mid-December peak. The day’s loss was the biggest for Tesla stock since 2020 and far outstripped the 2.7 percent drop on Monday in the S&P 500.
The steep rise in Tesla shares that followed Donald J. Trump’s election as president, and Mr. Musk’s appointment as de facto government cost-cutting czar, has evaporated along with more than $700 billion in stock market value.
Investors had hoped that Mr. Musk’s financial support for the Trump campaign and his ties to the White House would benefit Tesla, helping to clear regulatory hurdles to the company’s autonomous driving technology.
Instead, Mr. Musk’s ubiquitous presence in Washington has proved to be a liability. Investors worry that Mr. Musk has not been spending enough time managing Tesla when sales of the company’s cars are plunging.
Tesla has become the target of increasingly intense protests by people enraged over Mr. Musk’s leading role in slashing jobs of park rangers and other civil servants while gutting foreign aid and other programs.
Last week, someone set fire to Tesla charging stations near Boston; shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon; and protesters were arrested at a nonviolent protest at a Tesla dealership in Lower Manhattan.
The political backlash is blamed at least in part for dismal sales numbers in Europe last month, including a 76 percent decline in Tesla sales in Germany, the continent’s largest car market. Mr. Musk has endorsed far-right parties in European countries, including in Germany. Analysts also attribute sales declines to a lack of new models and increasing competition.
In January, Volkswagen sold more electric vehicles outside China than Tesla, according to figures published Monday by SNE Research, a research and consulting firm in South Korea.
Tesla is likely to suffer less than other carmakers from the trade conflicts provoked by Mr. Trump, but the company could be a victim of worsening relations with China. Tesla’s largest factory is in Shanghai, where the company makes cars for the Chinese market and for export to Europe and other regions.
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