Trump Administration Live Updates: Zelensky and Trump Speaking on Ukraine War
Where Things Stand
Ukraine: President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine are speaking by phone a day after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told Mr. Trump he would halt strikes on energy infrastructure if Kyiv did the same. Such a deal would fall short of the unconditional 30-day cease-fire that Ukraine has already agreed to, at the urging of the Trump administration. Read more ›
White House meeting: Oil and gas executives, some of whom are increasingly frustrated with Mr. Trump’s agenda, are scheduled to meet with him at the White House on Wednesday as they seek to influence him on tariffs, tax credits and deregulation. Read more ›
Deportation flights: The Trump administration faces another midday deadline to provide a federal judge in Washington with more information about flights that took migrants to El Salvador under an obscure wartime law. Justice Department lawyers have been uncooperative with Judge James E. Boasberg’s efforts to determine whether the government had violated a court order. The White House’s defiance has renewed fears of a constitutional crisis.
A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on Tuesday blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from pulling $14 billion in climate grant funding out of accounts at Citibank, where it has been held since late last year.
The grant funding has been caught up in a controversy for the last month after Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A.’s administrator, repeatedly suggested that the funds were vulnerable to fraud and that the selection of recipients under the Biden administration was marred by political favoritism. Mr. Zeldin has also linked the funds to a hidden-camera video released by Project Veritas last year.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan ruled that the E.P.A. had not offered “credible evidence” in support of its efforts to block the grants, nor had it followed proper procedures in canceling them.
The ruling comes after the E.P.A.’s attempts last week to terminate $20 billion in grants, the latest escalation in a weekslong dispute between the agency and eight nonprofits that were awarded funding to finance renewable energy and other climate projects last year. The funds have been frozen since mid-February at the request of the Trump administration.
Under the ruling, the E.P.A. cannot move forward with the grant termination process until the case makes its way through the courts, and Citibank is not allowed to transfer the funds back to the federal government if asked. The order addresses lawsuits from three of the nonprofits and affects $14 billion of the $20 billion in grants.
The judge’s decision fell short of ordering Citibank to allow grant recipients to withdraw money from their accounts.
A lawyer for Climate United, a nonprofit that was supposed to receive nearly $7 billion, had asked for access to some of the money, citing concerns about furloughing employees and paying rent. In a filing on Tuesday, Climate United said it was able to pause plans to furlough staff members after a donor offered a temporary emergency grant.
In a statement, the chief executive of Climate United, Beth Bafford, called the ruling a “strong step in the right direction.”
A spokesperson for Climate United said the organization plans to file for an injunction to release the funds in the coming days and expects a hearing to follow in the next few weeks.
In response to request for comment, the E.P.A. referred to a statement by Mr. Zeldin, posted on X, in which he emphasized the fact that the funds remain frozen. “I will not rest until these hard-earned taxpayer dollars are returned to the U.S. Treasury,” he said.
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Reporting from Washington
Since taking office, President Trump and his advisers have explained the president’s aggressive economic approach to tariffs with a litany of conflicting ideas. Other countries are “ripping off” America and need to be stopped. The United States is fighting a drug war with Canada, Mexico and China. Tariffs will help pay down the nation’s $36 trillion debt load.
The messaging hodgepodge comes as the U.S. economy shows signs of strain in response to Mr. Trump’s steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and as he prepares to enact “reciprocal” tariffs on imports from around the world on April 2.
The tariffs have sowed uncertainty and dampened business investment and consumer sentiment while sending markets gyrating daily. They are also likely to prevent the Federal Reserve from cutting rates as policymakers wait to see exactly what measures Mr. Trump follows through with and how they affect the economy.
But rather than trying to provide more coherence about their economic strategy, Mr. Trump and his advisers seem to be embracing the uncertainty of his approach as a feature, not a bug.
“Absolutely, between now and April 2, there’ll be some uncertainty,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on CNBC this week amid questions about what investors are to make of Mr. Trump’s trade agenda.
Mr. Trump, when asked whether he would give the business community more clarity about his overall approach, largely dismissed concerns that corporations needed predictability.
“No, I think that they say that,” he told Maria Bartiromo, the host of “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News this month. “You know, it sounds good to say. But, for years, the globalists, the big globalists have been ripping off the United States. They have been taking money away from the United States. And all we’re doing is getting some of it back. And we’re going to treat our country fairly.”
Mr. Trump has also refused to rule out a recession, an outcome that economists and analysts warn could become more likely amid such uncertainty.
The ratings firm Fitch warned this week that the global trade war Mr. Trump has started will reduce global growth and slow U.S. output while increasing prices and delaying the Federal Reserve’s interest rate cuts.
“Tariff hikes will result in higher U.S. consumer prices, reduce real wages and increase companies’ costs, and the surge in policy uncertainty will take a toll on business investment,” said Brian Coulton, Fitch’s chief economist.
The surge of uncertainty can largely be attributed to the fact that Mr. Trump views tariffs as a negotiating tool for solving policy issues of all varieties rather than an instrument for fixing trade distortions. As part of that approach, he aims to remain unpredictable to maximize his negotiating leverage.
“It does not help that the Trump 2.0 rollout to date has lacked strategic coherence and effective orchestration,” Navin Girishankar, the president of the economic security and technology department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an analysis this week. “The resulting policy volatility is already flowing through to financial markets and, by some accounts, to the real economy and communities around the country.”
Henrietta Treyz, the director of economic policy at the investment firm Veda Partners, said that lawmakers remained hopeful that the tariffs were a saber-rattling negotiating tactic and that markets would calm down when there was finally “certainty” about them. Investors, however, remain skittish.
“There is an emerging view on Capitol Hill that once we get past April 1, there will be certainty, and markets will calm down,” Ms. Treyz said. “That view is not shared by most investors who think the uncertainty is the near-term volatility driver but take the economic ramifications equally if not more seriously.”
While Mr. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to delay or water down tariffs as part of his negotiating strategy, it is not clear that market reaction has influenced his decisions in his second term. And unlike his first term, Mr. Trump’s top economic aides do not appear to be overly inclined to moderate his instincts.
“These policies are the most important thing America has ever had,” Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, told CBS News when asked earlier this month if Mr. Trump’s tariffs were worth it even if they tipped the U.S. economy into a recession. “It is worth it.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who this week declined to rule out the possibility of a recession, suggested in an interview on Tuesday that he was optimistic that some of the looming tariffs could be scaled back if other countries lowered their trade barriers. He did not, however, shy away from the idea that protectionism is good policy.
“President Trump has identified several critical industries, critical industries that we let get away from us,” Mr. Bessent said on the Fox Business Network. “He wants to bring back manufacturing to the United States, and we are putting these tariffs on.”
The continuous drama does appear to be taking a toll on the U.S. economy, stalling corporate deal activity and slowing some types of business investment.
Lawrence H. Summers, who served as Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, said that even if Mr. Trump ended up scaling back his tariffs, they were already doing damage.
“These are profoundly problematic steps even if reversed,” Mr. Summers said. “They generate immense uncertainty which overhangs the economy.”
Reporting from Washington
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, is set to be released from the House on April 2 and head toward a confirmation vote to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, after weeks of waiting to join President Trump’s cabinet.
Senate Republicans have been slow-walking Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation because of the too-tight margins in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson could not afford to lose a reliable Republican vote when he needed to pass the stopgap government funding measure that Democrats almost unanimously opposed.
So, despite being Mr. Trump’s first announced nominee to serve in his cabinet, Ms. Stefanik is now the only one who has yet to be confirmed. That has left her in a strange in-between: She is a member of the 119th Congress who is not seated on any subcommittees, and she attended the first Trump cabinet meeting despite the fact that she is not technically in it yet. When Mr. Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, she sat with the cabinet rather than her House colleagues.
But Ms. Stefanik’s awkward life in limbo can start to resolve on April 2, when two Trump-endorsed Republicans are expected to fill a pair of seats that were left vacant after the departures of former Representatives Mike Waltz and Matt Gaetz of Florida. Senate Republicans are then expected to move ahead with Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation, according to two people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The details of Ms. Stefanik’s confirmation proceedings were first reported by Axios.
A spokesman for Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, declined to comment on the schedule for the confirmation vote.
The Republican majority in the House will remain slim, but Mr. Johnson will have a little more room to maneuver. He has been forthright about his challenges.
“I had 220 Republicans and 215 Democrats, and then President Trump began to cull the herd,” Mr. Johnson said last month, referring to the president’s decision to select House Republicans to serve in his administration. “We have a one-vote margin now — smallest in history, right? So for a big chunk of the first 100 days of the Congress, and perhaps beyond, this is not an easy task, but we’re going to get it done.”
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The phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is underway, according to one of the president’s aides, Dan Scavino.
Elon Musk, President Trump’s close adviser, is continuing to ramp up his rhetoric against federal judges that thwart the Trump agenda. Musk said on X on Wednesday morning that a decision by a recent federal judge amounted to a “judicial coup” and that, “We need 60 senators to impeach the judges and restore rule of the people.” Judicial impeachment would require 67 votes, not the 60 votes needed to break a Senate filibuster.
Just as President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine are set to speak, Ukraine and Russia have announced that they carried out a prisoner swap today. Russia’s defense ministry said it exchanged 175 Ukrainian prisoners of war for the same number of Russian soldiers, along with 22 “gravely injured” Ukrainian prisoners who “need urgent medical assistance.”
Zelensky confirmed the swap in a statement on social media and said that the freed Ukrainians “will immediately receive the necessary medical and psychological assistance.” Putin had said in his call with Trump on Tuesday that Russia would return seriously wounded prisoners as a goodwill gesture, according to the Kremlin. And Zelensky has pressed for prisoner exchanges as part of any cease-fire.
A White House official said President Trump is scheduled to speak with President Volodymyr Zelensky by phone in the next 30 minutes or so. On Tuesday, Trump had a phone call with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian president agreed to temporarily halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, but did not agree to the U.S.-backed 30-day cease-fire that Ukraine had already agreed to.
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The Justice Department is trying to frame its confrontation with Judge Boasberg and the orders he has issued seeking the flight data as an encroachment by the judiciary on the executive branch. “The underlying premise of these orders, including the most recent one requiring the production of these facts ex parte today at noon, is that the judicial branch is superior to the executive branch, particularly on non-legal matters involving foreign affairs and national security,” department lawyers said in their emergency request for a stay.
The Justice Department, in its request for the stay, said it was considering an even more serious and escalatory request: Department lawyers said they might invoke what is known as the state secrets privilege to avoid revealing the flight data. The state secrets privilege is a doctrine that sometimes allows the government to block evidence from being used in court cases if it might jeopardize national security.
The Trump administration has been trying to avoid providing details to a federal judge about two flights it arranged last weekend deporting immigrants to El Salvador under the extraordinary powers of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act. Just now, the Justice Department asked the judge seeking that information, James E. Boasberg, for an emergency stay of his order from yesterday forcing administration officials to provide him with flight data on the two planes by noon today.
The request for a stay is hardly the only step the Trump administration has taken in trying to avoid handing over the information, which appears to be fairly well-documented in public flight databases. Earlier this week, the Justice Department sought to cancel a hearing where lawyers were supposed to talk about the flights in open court and then tried to have Judge Boasberg removed from the case altogether.
Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine
President Trump was speaking with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday to discuss next steps after the American leader’s discussion with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
The phone call began at 10 a.m. and was still underway nearly an hour later, according to a social media post by Dan Scavino, a senior White House aide to Mr. Trump.
Mr. Zelensky had said he expected Mr. Trump to brief him on the American president’s conversation a day earlier with Mr. Putin, in which the Russian leader agreed to a limited cease-fire. That proposal, which would halt attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, fell short of a 30-day unconditional truce that Kyiv had agreed to at Washington’s urging.
On Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky appeared open to the latest offer of a limited cease-fire, but said he thought that such a truce would need U.S. monitoring to work.
“Just the assertion and the word of Putin that he will not strike energy sites is too little,” Mr. Zelensky said. “War has made us practical people.”
Ukraine would prepare a list of sites that would need to be protected — and if monitoring confirmed that “Russia doesn’t strike our objects, we will not strike theirs,” he told a news conference in Helsinki alongside Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb.
Underscoring the lack of trust between Ukraine and Russia, the two countries traded accusations on Wednesday about attacks against each others’ energy infrastructure.
Mr. Zelensky has characterized some of the conditions Mr. Putin has set for a broader cease-fire — such as a demand for a complete cessation of foreign military and intelligence aid to Ukraine — as an attempt to stall for time so that Russia can improve its forces’ positions on the battlefield and its negotiating hand.
The Ukrainian president reiterated that point after the call between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump, saying that in setting conditions, Russia had made clear it was unwilling to end the war.
Ukraine’s European allies have cautiously welcomed any moves toward a cease-fire, while pledging further support for Kyiv and echoing concerns about Russia’s conditions.
“It’s a yes or a no. No buts, no conditions,” Mr. Stubb, Finland’s president, told the news conference. “Ukraine accepted a cease-fire without any form of conditions. If Russia refuses to agree, we need to increase our efforts to strengthen Ukraine and to ratchet up pressure on Russia.”
The 30-day cease-fire proposal that Ukraine had agreed to after talks with U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia was more extensive. It would have applied to land, air and sea — the first cessation of hostilities since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago. That monthlong truce, Mr. Zelensky has said, was meant to give time for fuller negotiations about a longer-term peace.
On Wednesday, he reiterated that Ukraine would have “red lines” going into any such talks.
“For us, a red line is the recognition of Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories as Russian,” he said. “We will not agree to that.”
Anastasia Kuznietsova and Johanna Lemola contributed reporting.
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Putin’s conditions for a cease-fire in Ukraine “do not seem realistic,” Sophie Primas, a French government spokeswoman, said on Wednesday, citing his call for halting all Western support for Ukraine. “A phone call between President Trump and President Putin cannot lead to a deal as long as the Ukrainians and Europeans themselves are not part of the discussion,” Primas said at a news conference.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, says Putin and Trump “trust each other” and intend to put relations between their two countries back on track. Peskov told Russian news agencies on Wednesday that there was “solid will by the two presidents” to restore ties, and that the leaders “understand each other very well.”
The Kremlin also accused Ukraine of violating an agreement to suspend strikes on energy facilities in both countries, even though no such deal has been signed. Peskov told reporters that an oil refinery in Russia’s south was hit by Ukrainian drones on Wednesday morning.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he will have a phone conversation later today with President Trump. He told a news conference in Finland that he expects to discuss the “details” of next steps after Trump’s conversation yesterday with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Putin agreed on Tuesday to temporarily halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kremlin, but that fell short of the unconditional U.S.-backed 30-day cease-fire that Ukraine had already agreed to.
Zelensky accused Russia of striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure despite the Kremlin’s promise to halt such attacks. “There were 150 drones launched overnight, including strikes on energy facilities,” he said. Earlier in the day, the Ukrainian railway network claimed that its power system had been hit.
Reporting on energy.
Oil and gas executives will meet with President Trump at the White House on Wednesday as they seek to influence him on tariffs, tax credits and deregulation.
Some executives in the industry, which spent more than $75 million to help elect Mr. Trump, are increasingly frustrated with his agenda. Tariffs are making essential materials like steel pipe more expensive while also rattling consumer confidence.
Oil prices have fallen around 14 percent since just before Mr. Trump took office, to less than $67 a barrel. Peter Navarro, a senior White House aide, has talked about the benefits of oil that sells for just $50 a barrel. At such prices, companies operating in wide swaths of the American oil patch would lose money drilling new wells.
Here are some of the industry’s priorities:
Tariffs
U.S. refineries buy oil from Canada and Mexico, transform it into fuels like gasoline, then export those more valuable products. These trade ties were formed over decades and would be difficult and expensive to untangle.
Mr. Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico with a lower, 10 percent rate for Canadian energy products. But this month he delayed the implementation of those tariffs on most goods, including energy imported under a North American trade agreement Mr. Trump negotiated during his first term. That reprieve is set to end in early April.
The 25 percent tariff on imported steel that took effect earlier this month is also a big concern for executives. The metal is used in everything from pipelines to wells, and it is getting more expensive because of the tariff. Some executives remain hopeful that they will able to secure exemptions, though Mr. Trump has rebuffed that idea.
Permitting Reform
Energy companies are pushing Mr. Trump and Congress to ease permitting rules to make it easier to build transmission lines, pipelines and other infrastructure. Many companies want to make it more difficult for states to block proposed projects and for environmentalists and others to tie them up in court.
“If you want more energy in the United States and you want more investment in the United States, we’ve got to be able to build things again. I’ve heard that repeatedly,” Chris Wright, the new U.S. energy secretary, said last week, summarizing feedback from executives he met at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston. “My answer is: Give me specifics. What permit? What was the thing?”
Natural-Gas Exports
Earlier on Wednesday, the Energy Department awarded conditional approval to a large natural-gas export project on the Gulf Coast, known as CP2 LNG. This is an area where oil and gas companies and the Trump administration are aligned: Both want to sell more natural gas abroad.
Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. paused permitting in January 2024 to study how the projects would affect climate change, among other concerns.
Natural gas is mostly made up of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that can leak from wells, pipelines and other infrastructure. Burning natural gas also produces carbon dioxide, another greenhouse gas, though far less compared with burning coal.
The Biden administration ultimately found that a big increase in U.S. exports could cause global greenhouse gas emissions to rise modestly and create pollution in communities near export terminals. A separate study released this month by S&P Global found that greater U.S. exports would help keep a lid on global emissions because the gas would displace other, dirtier sources of energy.
The developer of CP2, Venture Global, had been waiting more than three years for the Energy Department’s approval. The department said on Wednesday that it was granting approval because the project would help the U.S. economy and contribute to the energy security of the country and its allies.
Tax Credits
Some oil and gas companies want to preserve clean energy tax credits for producing hydrogen and renewable fuels, as well as capturing and storing carbon dioxide, the leading cause of climate change.
Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum, a large U.S. oil company that has been building a carbon capture plant in West Texas, is pushing to preserve federal incentives for removing the greenhouse gas from the air. That tax credit is known as 45Q based on its place in the tax code.
“To accelerate the technology at the pace that the U.S. needs it to accelerate to start having a positive impact on our energy independence, we need 45Q to happen and to stay in place,” Ms. Hollub said at CERAWeek.
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Reporting from Berlin
News analysis
When the Kremlin released its summary of President Vladimir V. Putin’s call Tuesday with President Trump, one thing was unmistakable: The Russian leader hadn’t retreated from his maximalist aims in Ukraine and so far has conceded little.
Much of what Mr. Putin agreed to during the call — including a limited 30-day halt on energy infrastructure strikes by both sides, a prisoner exchange and talks about security in the Black Sea — was spun as a concession to Mr. Trump in the respective summaries of the conversation released by Moscow and Washington.
But all were goals that the Kremlin has pursued and seen as advantageous in the past. Russia and Ukraine previously reached a tacit mutual agreement to refrain from energy infrastructure strikes, which have caused pain for both Moscow and Kyiv. Russia has long conducted prisoner exchanges with Ukraine, seeing the repatriation of its soldiers as a key Kremlin interest. And uninterrupted trading in the Black Sea is critical to Russia’s economy.
The lack of clear concessions on the Russian side stoked fears among Ukraine’s backers that Mr. Putin was playing for time, hewing to his staunch demands while hoping, in the meantime, that Washington’s tattered relationship with Kyiv fully breaks or that Ukrainian forces face a battlefield collapse.
Mr. Putin’s demands on Ukraine appeared unchanged. During the call, according to the Kremlin, Mr. Putin reiterated requirements for a comprehensive 30-day cease-fire that he knows are nonstarters for Ukraine. According to the Kremlin, he claimed that the Ukrainians had sabotaged and violated agreements in the past, and accused Ukraine of committing “barbaric terrorist crimes” in the Kursk region of Russia.
By Wednesday, the Kremlin was already accusing Kyiv of violating the limited cease-fire on energy infrastructure, even though President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine had yet to be briefed by Washington on the call or formally agree to the deal.
During Tuesday’s call, the Kremlin said, Mr. Putin also identified his “key condition” for settling the conflict more broadly: a complete cessation of outside military and intelligence support for Kyiv. Such an outcome, analysts say, would make Ukraine, a country far smaller than Russia, permanently hostage to Moscow’s overwhelming military superiority and forever stranded within the Kremlin’s orbit, without any counterbalancing backers.
The Kremlin may be hoping that during the course of negotiations, an already impatient Washington walks away from Ukraine for good, freeing Mr. Putin to continue his war while also separately re-establishing relations with the United States. Russia may also be counting on the possibility that Kyiv, facing an increasingly dire picture on the battlefield and the loss of its biggest backer, ultimately agrees to an erosion of its sovereignty that benefits the Kremlin.
“The best outcome for Putin is one where he accomplishes his aims in Ukraine and can normalize relations with the U.S.,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former U.S. intelligence official who is now an analyst at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. “So Putin wants to string Trump along to give him just enough to see if he can accomplish that.”
Ms. Kendall-Taylor added that Mr. Putin will feel he has little to lose, believing that Mr. Trump, who has made no secret of his dim view of Ukraine and of Washington’s European allies, “won’t be willing to really ramp up pressure on Russia or recommit to Europe.”
“There is a lot of incentive for the Russians to participate, to play along and look for every opportunity to use this construct to their maximum advantage,” Ms. Kendall-Taylor said.
Mr. Putin also has significant advantages on the battlefield. His forces are winning back territory. Ukraine’s biggest and most important supporter, the United States, is openly itching to abandon Kyiv, as well as Europe more broadly. Europe, suddenly realizing its peril without U.S. backing, has been caught flat-footed and is now scrambling to figure out how to secure its own defense — let alone that of Ukraine.
“In Russian diplomatic functioning, negotiations often are just tools of winning time and depriving the adversary of its balance,” said Andras Racz, a senior research fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Mr. Racz said that Washington’s stated desire to reach a quick resolution to the conflict confers a certain advantage to Moscow, which is “not in a hurry.”
He held out the possibility that the Trump administration, faced with Mr. Putin’s refusal to cede ground on Ukraine, could begin applying pressure on Russia. Mr. Trump has made such threats in the past.
The White House could also offer Mr. Putin more.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Washington’s power in Europe grew significantly, with many of the countries that once answered to Moscow joining NATO and ultimately the West. Mr. Putin has never accepted that outcome, making him eager to hold broader discussions on European security with the Trump administration. His apparent hope is that Washington will not only agree to an arrangement that places Ukraine in Russia’s orbit but also will concede a broader curtailment of U.S. influence on the continent. Washington’s ability to grant those broader wishes gives the White House some measure of leverage, even if previous administrations ruled them out as impossible.
“Trump has few options to counter either a Russian rejection or protracted feigned compliance,” wrote Alexander Baunov, a Russian author and political analyst. “The most effective method will be the carrot rather than the stick: the temptation of a major deal.”
Russia, while giving little on Ukraine, has begun trying to lure Washington with the fruits of a rapprochement. Russian officials have been touting their vast reserves of rare earth metals, saying they would be happy to exploit them with American companies, and holding out possible deals for American investors in the Russian energy sector.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump spent part of the discussion on Tuesday talking about what the Kremlin called “a wide range of areas in which our countries could establish interaction,” including ideas about cooperation in the energy sector. The Russian leader, according to the Kremlin, secured Mr. Trump’s agreement to hold hockey tournaments with Russian and American professional players facing off against one another.
Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said that the Kremlin would be hoping to get the United States to restore ties without predicating renewed relations on an end to the fighting in Ukraine. That’s why, he added, the Kremlin is front-loading the discussion with all the potential benefits for the United States from a renewed relationship with Russia.
“The impression is that they have a very, very, very good reading of Trump,” Mr. Gabuev said of the Kremlin. “They know where the weak spots are, they know how to massage his ego. To me, the Russian team is winning at this point.”
Reporting from Washington
News Analysis
Over the weekend, the Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, violating an instruction that could not have been plainer or more direct.
Justice Department lawyers later justified the administration’s actions with contentions that many legal experts said bordered on frivolous.
The line between arguments in support of a claimed right to disobey court orders and outright defiance has become gossamer thin, they said, again raising the question of whether the latest clash between President Trump and the judiciary amounts to a constitutional crisis.
Legal scholars say that is no longer the right inquiry. Mr. Trump is already undercutting the separation of powers at the heart of the constitutional system, they say, and the right question now is how it will transform the nation.
“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, “the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.”
Mr. Trump raised the stakes on Tuesday by calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued the order, James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, describing him on social media as a “Radical Left Lunatic.”
The president did so even as the issues at hand have just started to be tested in a case that seems headed to the Supreme Court.
A few hours later, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued an unusual statement, seemingly prompted by such exhortations, and perhaps by the filing of articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg by a Republican member of the House.
“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” the chief justice said. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
In an appearance on Fox News, Mr. Trump told Laura Ingraham that the chief justice had not mentioned him by name. Still, the dueling statements, coming on top of the lower court showdown over the deportations, fueled a sense that the clash long predicted between Mr. Trump and the federal judiciary had been fully engaged.
Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said that assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”
“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Professor Huq said. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”
The contested directive was issued at a hearing on Saturday by Judge Boasberg. It sought to pause the removal of more than 200 migrants said to be members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador, after Mr. Trump invoked the wartime authorities of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to order them deported. The Trump administration ignored the order, issued from the bench, to return planes in the air to the United States.
“However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you,” Judge Boasberg told a government lawyer. “But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
The planes kept flying.
At a hearing on Monday, another government lawyer said the administration was not bound by the oral order, however specific, but only by a docket entry summarizing it in general terms, without reference to the planes but starting with the phrase “as discussed in today’s hearing.”
The administration may well win before the justices on the underlying issues in the case, which involve difficult constitutional questions about presidential power over national security and immigration. But those issues are separate from the current one: Must the president obey court orders he contends are wrong while he appeals them?
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, defended the administration’s conduct on social media.
“The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” she wrote, adding that “the written order and the administration’s actions do not conflict.” She did not address whether the administration had complied with the judge’s oral directive.
Ms. Leavitt added that Judge Boasberg had overstepped his authority. “A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrying foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil,” she said.
All of that may be so, but Judge Boasberg’s oral order was not hard to understand.
If there was authentic doubt about what Judge Boasberg meant, legal experts said, the better practice would have been to seek clarification or to appeal.
“It should go without saying that, at the Justice Department, the rule of the road is that, in the absence of a true emergency, the government complies with judicial orders, even if the orders are patently lawless, until it can get them reversed — either by the issuing judge or a higher court,” Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in the right-leaning National Review. “It’s all right to complain bitterly about court orders, but they are not to be ignored, much less knowingly flouted.”
The administration has chosen a different path, Mr. McCarthy argued. “The government seems to be intentionally instigating fireworks,” he wrote. “That seems like a terrible legal strategy, but it may be winning politics … at least for a little while,” he added, using ellipses for emphasis.
In 1967, in a case involving the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Supreme Court ruled that he and several colleagues were not entitled to test the constitutionality of a legally questionable court order barring them from demonstrating by marching in Birmingham, Ala.
The right approach, Justice Potter Stewart wrote for the majority, was to ask the courts to have the injunction clarified, modified or dissolved. “In the fair administration of justice,” he wrote, “no man can be judge in his own case, however exalted his station, however righteous his motives.”
The lawyer representing the government at Monday’s hearing had another argument: that Judge Boasberg was powerless to order the planes to turn around once they had left American airspace. That assertion was also labeled unconvincing by many legal experts.
“The administration has this completely wrong,” Hannah L. Buxbaum, a law professor at Indiana University, wrote in a blog post. “The judge is ordering the administration to take action inside the United States — that is, to instruct the planes to turn around. That instruction will in turn cause something to happen elsewhere (the pilots will change course), but that doesn’t make the order impermissibly extraterritorial.”
It is routine, she added, for judges to order people in the United States to cause things to happen abroad, like turn over evidence or assets.
Professor Huq acknowledged that there was “often some uncertainty about exactly what compliance with a court order against an agency requires.”
But there are limits, he added. “The Trump administration is pushing that uncertainty to a breaking point,” he said, “just as it has pushed the idea that the executive has to comply with statutes to a breaking point.”
Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, said the development was emblematic of how the Trump administration had acted in its first months in office.
“The problem with this administration is not just acute episodes, like what’s happening with Judge Boasberg and the Venezuelan deportation,” Professor Karlan said. “It’s a chronic disrespect for constitutional norms and for the other branches of government.”
Asked whether the nation had reached a tipping point plunging it into a constitutional crisis, Professor Karlan questioned the premise. “‘Tipping point’ suggests a world in which things are fine until suddenly they’re not,” she said. “But we’re past the first point already.”
The administration’s maximalist view of presidential power, amplified by its lawyers, could spiral as Mr. Trump acts without restraint, Professor Greene said.
“An executive branch that operates without internal legal constraint but solely on the basis of its ability to get away with things, whether politically or legally, is itself sufficient to produce a constitutional crisis,” he said. “A president who does whatever he wants until someone stops him is a constitutional crisis whether or not he is sometimes stopped.”
Mr. Trump has not been shy about claiming power. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he wrote on social media last month.
The administration sometimes seems to be speaking to two audiences at once. In court, it says it is complying with the letter if not the spirit of judicial orders. In public communications, the administration and its allies adopt the language of defiance, notably by attacking judges.
But in other settings, Mr. Trump has defended judges from what he called illegal criticism. Last week, in remarks at the Justice Department, he said that “it has to be illegal, influencing judges.”
He was mostly defending Judge Aileen M. Cannon of the Southern District of Florida, who had dismissed one of the criminal cases against him. But he spared a thought for the Supreme Court.
“They don’t want bad publicity, and it’s truly interference in my opinion,” he said of criticism of the court. “And it should be illegal, and it probably is illegal in some form. There’s no difference than speaking to a judge or shouting to a judge or doing whatever you have to do in a courthouse.”
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The Social Security Administration said on Tuesday that people who wanted to file for benefits or change the bank where their payments are deposited could no longer do so by phone and must first verify their identity online or go into a field office.
The change, which takes effect on March 31, is expected to add stress to the agency’s already thinning work force, which is being significantly downsized as part of the broad effort to aggressively shrink the federal government. At the same time, the change would also make things more difficult for older and disabled beneficiaries who may have trouble getting into an office or struggle with online services.
“This change will substantially delay their access to their earned benefits,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “All families with children who qualify for benefits will have to visit S.S.A. in person because children cannot have ‘my Social Security’ accounts.”
She noted that the average callback time on phones to make an in-person appointment is more than two hours and the wait time to make an in-person appointment is over a month. “These delays will only worsen as S.S.A. cuts thousands of staff and millions more people need to make appointments,” she added.
The agency said that it would allow people who do not or can’t use the agency’s online “my Social Security” services — which requires online identity proofing — to start their retirement or disability claims for benefits by phone. But the process wouldn’t be completed until the applicant’s identity was verified in person.
That’s why the agency has said it now suggests people to call the agency (1-800-772-1213) to both request an in-person appointment and begin their claim at the same time.
By using a service imported from the Treasury Department, the agency said it would be able to process all direct deposit change requests — in person and online — in one business day. Before, these changes were held for 30 days.
Still, district managers at the agency in internal discussions on Tuesday voiced concerns that implementing these changes with fewer staff members would be unrealistic, said one employee familiar with the conversations who spoke under the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak with the press.
The Trump administration said the changes would further safeguard Social Security records and benefits against fraudulent activity. “Americans deserve to have their Social Security records protected with the utmost integrity and vigilance,” Lee Dudek, the acting commissioner of Social Security, said in a statement. “For far too long the agency has used antiquated methods for proving identity.”
The agency has announced plans to cut up to 12 percent of its work force, at a time its staffing is at a 50-year low. It has also offered early retirement and other incentives to the entire staff, and will close six of its 10 regional offices, which coordinate and provide support to employees.
Of its 1,200 field offices that directly serve the public, more than 40 are to be closed, according to Social Security Works, an advocacy group. The group is trying to track the changes but said that its data was based on an unreliable list released by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from banning transgender people from serving in the military.
In a forcefully written opinion that rebuked the president’s effort, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes issued an injunction that allows trans troops to keep serving in the military, under rules that were established by the Biden administration, until their lawsuit against the Trump administration’s ban is decided.
“The ban at bottom invokes derogatory language to target a vulnerable group in violation of the Fifth Amendment,” Judge Reyes wrote.
The government had argued that courts must defer to military judgment, but in a 79-page opinion, the judge said the government had thrown together a ban based on next-to-no evidence and that “the law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture.”
According to the Defense Department, about 4,200 current service members, or about 0.2 percent of the military, are transgender. They include pilots, senior officers, nuclear technicians and Green Berets as well as rank-and-file soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Despite their relatively small numbers, they have been a disproportionate focus of the Trump administration.
In January, President Trump signed a caustically worded executive order saying that trans troops had afflicted the military with “radical gender ideology,” and that the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
In February, the Defense Department issued new policies that included the same language, and said that all trans troops, regardless of merit, would be forced out of the military.
Several service members immediately sued, saying the policy amounted to illegal discrimination that violated their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law.
The military was still finalizing its plans for putting the ban into effect, and had not yet forced any trans troops out, though it had encouraged them to “voluntarily separate,” and had even offered payments to encourage their fast departure. The Navy had set a deadline of March 28 for trans sailors to request voluntary separation.
In the six weeks since Mr. Trump’s executive order was signed, troops say, they have been forced to use the pronouns and conform to the grooming standards of their birth sex, and they have been denied medical care, passed over for assignments, sent home from deployments and put on administrative leave.
“Their lives and careers are completely disrupted,” said Shannon Minter, a lawyer who represents the service members and is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights. “That’s why getting them immediate relief is so important.”
Mr. Minter said Mr. Trump’s executive order was so loaded with illegal ill will — known in the legal world as animus — toward a specific group of people that he felt it was unlikely to survive the scrutiny of a federal court.
At a contentious hearing on March 12, Judge Reyes, who was appointed by President Biden in 2023, spent a full day firing questions at Justice Department lawyers who were defending the policy, and she often showed frustration with their responses.
The judge went line by line through reports on transgender service members that the government had cited when the ban was issued, noting that data were years out of date and that the Defense Department’s conclusions were “totally, grossly misleading,” because they “cherry-picked one part, and misrepresented even that.”
The evidence presented was so thin, she said at one point, that the Defense Department might have well cited the latest Beyoncé album.
“How can you even say that — that a whole group of people lack humility?” the judge said to the government’s lawyers about one claimed justification for the ban. “It just makes no sense.”
One of the government lawyers, Jason Manion, argued in the hearing that federal law gives special leeway to the military to make decisions, and that it was not the court’s job to decide on the merit of the Defense Department’s evidence. “At the end of the day we are asking you to defer to military judgment,” Mr. Manion said.
“You keep assuming that judgment is embedded in this," the judge responded. “The only judgment in this case, far as I can tell,” she said, is that the administration believed that transgender people lack integrity, humility, judgment and a warrior ethos.
The judge repeatedly hinted that the apparent lack of evidence that trans troops in the ranks had any negative effect suggested that the administration’s policy was driven by animus.
Mr. Manion argued that showing that animus influenced the policy would not be enough to justify finding it illegal. Citing a Supreme Court ruling that upheld President Trump’s 2017 executive order banning travelers from seven majority-Muslim nations, he said the order regarding trans troops would be illegal only if it were based solely on animus, and nothing else.
“Just having evidence of animus,” he said, “doesn’t get over the hump.”
Trans troops have already prevailed in court once against a similar order. Early in his first term in office, President Trump announced a transgender ban on Twitter, but the policy was quickly blocked by two federal judges.
The resulting injunction remained in place for two years, until a 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court allowed a reconfigured ban to take effect while the court considered the constitutionality of the policy. The case was dropped after President Joe Biden rescinded Mr. Trump’s ban in 2021, leaving unsettled the question of whether a ban on transgender service members would be constitutional.
The Trump administration’s latest effort is a remarkable departure from a 77-year trend in the military toward welcoming an increasingly diverse variety of Americans. Over that time, it was generally the White House that was pushing for more inclusion, and the military that was resisting. Now the roles have flipped.
Military leaders have repeatedly opposed the transgender ban.
The transgender order is part of a sweeping effort to roll back diversity efforts in the military, efforts that the Trump administration sees as counterproductive. The rollback has included firing some top military leaders, ending recognition of Gay Pride and Black History months, and purging content mentioning diversity and inclusion efforts from Defense Department websites — even removing a photo of the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb, presumably because its name, Enola Gay, was flagged in a search for words the department wanted to scrub.
This week the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it would end gender affirming care for trans veterans.
“If veterans want to attempt to change their sex, they can do so on their own dime,” Doug Collins, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs said Monday.
Though the new injunction has spared trans service members from dismissal for now, many say it will be difficult to go on with their careers as if nothing had happened.
Sgt. First Class Julia Becraft, assigned to an Army armor battalion in Texas, was slated to be promoted to platoon leader this coming July, but since the ban was announced, the promotion has been put on hold.
She was so distraught over the president’s order that she decided to take vacation time to focus on her mental health, and has been attending therapy sessions.
“Everyone in my unit has been really supportive, but my world has been turned upside down,” she said.
Sergeant Becraft has served in the Army for 14 years, deployed to Afghanistan three times, and been awarded a Bronze Star. Now she faces being forced out of the service with no retirement benefits.
Even if she is ultimately allowed to stay, she said, the actions of the president have her wondering whether she can still commit to serving her country.
“It’s not just because they came after me and want me out,” she said. “It’s a culmination of all the other things they are doing: take down the D.E.I. efforts, firing of all these great leaders for no reason. I wish I could stay strong and fight, but, honestly, I’m just scared.”
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Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday reversed a change that had made some of its claims far more difficult to fact-check.
In early March, the group — which had been caught in a series of high-profile errors — began posting itemized claims about the savings it had achieved from canceling federal grants. Its website interface provided only minimal details about those grants but the site’s public source code included identification numbers, making it possible to glean more information from other official sources.
On March 5, however, the group removed those identifiers from the code, while also adding thousands more grants, making it very difficult to verify the figures provided. A White House official said the group had withheld identifying information “for security purposes.”
On Tuesday, the group added some of the missing details, providing links to many of the grants’ entries in a federal spending database, USAspending.gov. Now, fact-checkers will have the ability to match the claims with other sources.
The White House did not respond to a question about the change.
The new details provided by the group made clear that its claims about these canceled grants also contained the same kind of errors that had marred its previous work.
For instance, the group said that it had saved $1.75 billion by cutting a U.S. Agency for International Development grant to a nonprofit called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
The New York Times reported last week that Gavi had said that the website’s claims were wrong. The nonprofit said that its grant had not been canceled and that, even if it was, all the money it was owed had already been paid. So canceling the grant would save nothing.
The Times had identified that grant using the details that Mr. Musk’s group had briefly embedded in the source code of its website.
On Tuesday, that erroneous claim about the $1.75 billion grant was still on DOGE’s website, which the group calls its “wall of receipts,” — its line by line accounting of the group’s purported cost savings.
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