Trump news at a glance: president shrugs off tariff turmoil as ‘medicine’

Asia’s key indexes tumbled in early trading on Monday as fears of a tariff-induced global recession continued to rip through markets. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index plunged nearly 9% in early trading on Monday, while South Korea’s Kospi index was halted for five minutes as stocks plummeted. Despite his tariffs wiping $6tn off US stocks, Trump appeared nonchalant late Sunday, saying, “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.” Separately, Hugo Lowell exclusively reveals how Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz came to include the Atlantic’s chief editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the infamous Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen. An internal investigation showed a series of missteps that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month. Here are the key stories at a glance: Trump says countries must ‘pay us a lot of money’ to escape tariffs Trump said he had spoken to leaders from Europe and Asia over the weekend, who hope to convince him to lower tariffs that are as high as 50% and due to take effect this week. “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” Trump said, speaking to reporters on Air Force One late Sunday. Read the full story Senior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoil Senior Trump administration officials gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs, which have provoked rare expressions of dissent from within the Republican party. Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talkshows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariffs on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. One official took an aggressive stance on the tariffs, while two others suggested they were negotiable. Read the full story Exclusive: how the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the White House Signal group chat Three people briefed on the White House investigation said Waltz inadvertently saved the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his iPhone under the contact card for Brian Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council. According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related. Read the full story US attorney general says Trump likely ‘going to be finished’ after second term Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has expressed skepticism about the idea of Trump serving a third term in the White House, saying that when her boss’s current presidency ends on 20 January 2029, he is probably “going to be finished”. Bondi’s comments come just a week after Trump gave his most blunt indication yet that he was seriously considering trying for a third term to follow up ones that began in 2017 and this past January – despite the clear prohibition against doing so enshrined in the US constitution. Read the full story A Nicaraguan asylum seeker checked in with Ice every week. He was arrested anyway Alberto Lovo Rojas, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, had been worried for weeks that immigration officials would arrest him. But he had pushed the worry aside as irrational – he had a permit to legally work in the US, and he had been using an app to check in monthly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Still, something felt off. The Trump administration had promised mass deportations, and in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration, Ice had asked him to do extra check-ins each weekend. His last check-in with Ice was on 5 February – all normal. On 8 February, they came for him. Read the full story DoJ lawyer put on leave after not backing erroneous deportation of Maryland man A federal justice department attorney, Erez Reuveni, has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it erroneously deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. Read the full story. Second child dies of measles in Texas amid growing outbreak A second child with measles has died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone. The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles” – which is easily preventable through vaccination. Read the full story In depth: Trump’s third term trial balloon: how extremist ideas become mainstream For longtime Trump watchers, the president’s suggestion that there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution to potentially serve a third term, it smacked of a familiar playbook of the American right and the Maga movement: float a trial balloon, no matter how wacky or extreme. Let far-right media figures such as Steve Bannon make the case that it’s not so outlandish because, after all, Democrats are worse. Stand by as Republicans in Congress avoid then equivocate then actively endorse. Watch a fringe idea slowly but surely become normalised. Read the full story What else happened today: Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency. A woman being detained in Arizona by US border patrol for overstaying her visa died by suicide, according to Pramila Jayapal, who said “initial reports” suggested border patrol agents failed to perform required welfare checks prior to the woman’s death. A wildlife crossing in Los Angeles that cuts across a major freeway will connect two parts of the Santa Monica mountains for animals and is starting to take shape. Catching up? Here’s what happened on 5 April 2025.