WASHINGTON — After President Donald Trump reversed course on his tariffs and announced he would pursue trade negotiations, he had a simple explanation for how he would make decisions in the coming weeks.

“Instinctively, more than anything else,” he told reporters this past week. “You almost can’t take a pencil to paper, it’s really more of an instinct than anything else.”

It was the latest example of how Trump loves to keep everyone on edge for his next move. Trump has not only expansively flexed the powers of the presidency by declaring emergencies and shredding political norms, he has eschewed traditional deliberative procedures for making decisions. The result is that more of life around the country and the world is subject to the president’s desires, moods and grievances than ever before.

“We have a democratic leader who seems to have the authority to act as whimsically as a 19th century European autocrat,” said Tim Naftali, a historian and senior research scholar at Columbia University. “He sneezes and everyone catches a cold.”

The White House rejects criticism that Trump is overstepping his authority or improperly consolidating power. Administration officials frequently emphasize that the Republican president won a clear election victory and is now pursuing the agenda that he campaigned on. In this view, resisting his will, such as when courts block his executive orders, is the real threat to democracy.

“Trust in President Trump,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Friday while answering questions about economic policy. “He knows what he’s doing.”

The presidency has been accumulating power for years, long before Trump ran for office, and it is not unusual for administrations to veer in various directions based on political and policy priorities. But Trump’s new term has been different in the early months, and he seems to recognize it.

“The second term is just more powerful,” Trump marveled recently. “When I say ‘do it,’ they do it.”

Although international trade offers the most extensive example of Trump’s inclination to act unilaterally since he returned to office in January the same approach has been evident elsewhere.

He installed himself as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to overhaul programming at Washington’s premier cultural institution. He issued an order to purge “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s network of museums. He punished law firms associated with his opponents. He directed the Justice Department to investigate former officials who crossed him during his first term.

When Trump decided to remove regulations on household water efficiency — he wants more water flowing in showers — his executive order said the normal public comment period “is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”

“What the president ends up having is what he wants, which is everyone’s attention all of the time,” Naftali said.

Trump’s ambitions stretch beyond the United States, such as his goal of annexing Greenland. Vice President JD Vance visited the island last month to talk about its strategic location in the Arctic, where Russia and China want to expand their influence, but also its importance to Trump himself.

“We can’t just ignore the president’s desires,” Vance said.

Trump has spent decades trying to turn his impulses into reality, whether it’s skyscrapers in Manhattan or casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He once sued a journalist for allegedly underestimating his net worth. During a deposition, Trump said “it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”

A lawyer for the journalist appeared puzzled. “You said your net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?”

Trump said yes. “I would say it’s my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked.”

He took a similar approach into the White House for his first term. While talking about the economy with The Washington Post, Trump said “my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

Leon Panetta, who was White House chief of staff under Democratic President Bill Clinton and later served in national security roles for Democratic President Barack Obama, said there normally is a more deliberative process for critical issues.

“If you throw all of that out of the window and operate based on gut instincts, what you’re doing is making every decision a huge gamble,” Panetta said. “Because you just haven’t done the homework to really understand all of the implications.”

“When you roll dice,” he added, “sometimes it’s going to come up snake eyes.”

Because Trump does not have a clear process for making decisions, Panetta said “that means everybody has to kowtow to him because that’s the only way you’re going to have any impact.”

Trump has seemed to enjoy that aspect of the ongoing controversy over tariffs. During a Republican dinner this past week, he said foreign leaders were “kissing my ass” to talk him out of his trade agenda.

The saga began on April 2 when Trump declared that trade deficits — when the U.S. buys more products from some countries than it sells — represented a national emergency, enabling him to enact tariffs without congressional approval.

The stock market collapsed and then the bond market began to slide. On Wednesday, Trump backed off his plans.

Although high taxes have been left in place on imports from China, many of the other targeted tariffs have been paused for 90 days to allow time for negotiations with individual countries.

“Americans should trust in that process,” said Leavitt, the press secretary.

Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the conservative Cato Institute, expressed concern that the course of international trade was becoming dependent on the “whims of a single dude in the Oval Office.”

Lincicome said the White House timeline to reach trade deals was “not credible” given the complexity of the issues. A more likely scenario, he said, is that the resulting agreements will be nothing more than “superficial nothingburgers” and Trump will ”declare a great victory and all this stuff settles down.”

Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, said in an interview with Fox Business Network that there’s “a whole portion of our White House working day and night” on negotiations.

“We’re going to run 90 deals in 90 days,” he said. “It’s possible.”

Kathleen Sgamma, the president of a Denver-based oil and gas trade association called the Western Energy Alliance, withdrew her consideration to lead the Bureau of Land Management, Senator Mike Lee said during the beginning of a Thursday hearing that would have considered her nomination.

Lee, the chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said White House officials informed him of the change early Thursday morning.

Trump nominated Sgamma, a vocal critic of the Biden administration’s energy and public land policies, for the position in February.

She previously called the volume of leases issued on federal lands under the Biden administration “ridiculously low” and praised one of Trump’s first executive orders of his second term that aimed to boost oil and gas production on public lands.

“It was an honor to be nominated by President Trump as Director of the Bureau of Land Management, but unfortunately at this time I need to withdraw my nomination,” Sgamma said in a statement shared by a White House spokesperson with The Denver Post. “I will continue to support President Trump and fight for his agenda to Unleash American Energy in the private sector.”

Sgamma did not return a voicemail seeking further information.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in an email to the Post that the administration accepted Sgamma’s withdrawal and looks forward to putting forth another nominee.

The Bureau of Land Management controls about 245 million acres of land, 700 million acres of subsurface and 30% of the country’s minerals, according to the agency. The lands have multiple uses, including energy development, mining, livestock grazing and conservation.

In Colorado, three national conservation areas, five wilderness areas, two national monuments and 53 wilderness study areas across a combined 8.3 million acres are all controlled by the agency.

The reason for Sgamma’s withdrawal remains unknown, but her criticism of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol surfaced in recent days.

On Tuesday, an investigative journalism project known as Documented released a 2021 memo Sgamma sent to oil executives detailing her “disgust” for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capital and “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.”

“We must listen and accept others whom we disagree with, even when they don’t return that respect,” she wrote. “We must stick to our nation’s founding principles of the sanctity and rights of every individual, even as many forces are undermining those basic principles.”

She ended the letter by wishing then-President-elect Joe Biden “the best of luck in his goal to return to normalcy and moderation.”

The former interior secretary under Trump, David Bernhardt, said her withdrawal was “self-inflicted,” and included a link to the website that posted her 2021 comments, according to reporting by the Associated Press. Bernhardt suggested that people whose views don’t align with Trump’s should not seek political appointments.

Officials with the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group, and the Center for Biological Diversity, a national nonprofit based on environment advocacy, applauded the withdrawal.

The Center for Western Priorities’ Deputy Director Aaron Weiss told the Associated Press that Sgamma’s withdrawal underscored the Trump administration’s creation of a “loyalty test” to weed out subordinates who are out of step with him.

He said she had refused to publicly disclose the Western Energy Alliance’s members, preventing journalists and activists from identifying her potential conflicts of interest if confirmed to lead the BLM.

“Good riddance to Sgamma, whose withdrawal is good news for America’s public lands and imperiled animals,” Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity said. “There’s no doubt that Trump’s next nominee will also be a poisonous threat to our wildlife and wild places, but this speedbump gives senators a chance to ponder whether they really want to feed America’s public lands and monuments into the snapping jaws of the fracking and mining industries.”

Sgamma helped author the energy policy section of Project 2025, a policy document from conservative thinkers outlining proposed goals for Trump’s second term. The section she contributed to criticized the Biden administration for waging a “war on fossil fuels” and proposed maximizing oil and gas leasing across the country.

Sgamma joined the Western Energy Alliance in 2006. Before that, she worked 11 years in the information technology sector and three years as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army.

Sgamma was the second Coloradan to be nominated by Trump to lead a federal agency. Chris Wright, formerly CEO of Denver-based Liberty Energy, was previously confirmed as head of the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump said Sunday that he won’t back down on his sweeping tariffs on imports from most of the world unless countries even out their trade with the U.S., digging in on his plans to implement the taxes that have sent financial markets reeling, raised fears of a recession and upended the global trading system.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump said he didn’t want global markets to fall, but also that he wasn’t concerned about the massive sell-off either, adding, “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”

His comments came as global financial markets appeared on track to continue sharp declines once trading resumes Monday, and after Trump’s aides sought to soothe market concerns by saying more than 50 nations had reached out about launching negotiations to lift the tariffs.

“I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world,” Trump said. “They’re dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re going to have surpluses or at worst, going to be breaking even.”

The higher rates are set to be collected beginning Wednesday, ushering in a new era of economic uncertainty with no clear end in sight. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said unfair trade practices are not “the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.” The United States, he said, must see “what the countries offer and whether it’s believable.”

Trump, who spent the weekend in Florida playing golf, posted online that “WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy.” His Cabinet members and economic advisers were out in force Sunday defending the tariffs and downplaying the consequences for the global economy.

“There doesn’t have to be a recession. Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week?” Bessent said. “What we are looking at is building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity.”

U.S. stock futures dropped on Sunday night as the tariffs continued to roil the markets. S&P 500 futures were down 2.5% while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 2.1%. Nasdaq futures were down 3.1%. Even the price of bitcoin, which held relatively stable last week, fell nearly 6% Sunday.

Asian shares, meanwhile, nosedived. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index lost nearly 8% shortly after the market opened. By midday, it was down 6%. A circuit breaker briefly suspended trading of Topix futures after an earlier sharp fall in U.S. futures. Chinese markets also tumbled, with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropping 9.4%, while the Shanghai Composite index lost 6.2%.

Trump’s tariff blitz, announced April 2, fulfilled a key campaign promise as he acted without Congress to redraw the rules of global trade. It was a move decades in the making for Trump, who has long denounced foreign trade deals as unfair to the U.S. He is gambling that voters will be willing to endure higher prices for everyday items to enact his economic vision.

Countries are scrambling to figure out how to respond to the tariffs, with China and others retaliating quickly.

Top White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett acknowledged that other countries are “angry and retaliating,” and, he said, “by the way, coming to the table.” He cited the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative as reporting that more than 50 nations had reached out to the White House to begin talks.

Adding to the turmoil, the new tariffs are hitting American allies and adversaries alike, including Israel, which is facing a 17% tariff. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit the White House and speak at a press conference with Trump on Monday, with his office saying the tariffs would be a point of discussion with Trump along with the war in Gaza and other issues.

Another American ally, Vietnam, a major manufacturing center for clothing, has also been in touch with the administration about the tariffs. Trump said Vietnam’s leader said in a telephone call that his country “wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S.” And a key European partner, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, said she disagreed with Trump’s move but was “ready to deploy all the tools — negotiating and economic — necessary to support our businesses and our sectors that may be penalized.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made clear there was no postponing tariffs that are days away.

“The tariffs are coming. Of course they are,” he said, adding that Trump needed to reset global trade. But he committed only to having them “definitely” remain “for days and weeks.”

In Congress, where Trump’s Republican Party has long championed free trade, the tariff regiment has been met with applause but also significant unease.

Several Republican senators have already signed onto a new bipartisan bill that would require presidents to justify new tariffs to Congress. Lawmakers would then have to approve the tariffs within 60 days, or they would expire. Nebraska GOP Rep. Don Bacon said Sunday that he would introduce a House version of the bill, saying that Congress needs to restores its powers over tariffs.

“We gave some of that power to the executive branch. I think, in hindsight, that was a mistake,” said Bacon, adding that getting a measure passed would be challenging unless the financial markets continue to react negatively and other indicators such as inflation and unemployment shift.

Wyoming’s John Barrasso, the No. 2 member of the Senate’s GOP leadership, said Trump is “doing what he has every right to do.” But, he acknowledged, “there is concern, and there’s concern across the country. People are watching the markets.”

“There’ll be a discussion in the Senate,” Barrasso said of the tariffs. “We’ll see which way the discussion goes.”

Trump’s government cost-cutting guru, billionaire businessman Elon Musk, had been relatively silent on Trump’s tariffs, but said at a weekend event in Italy that he would like to see the U.S. and Europe move to “a zero-tariff situation.” The comment from the Tesla owner who leads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency drew a rebuke from White House trade adviser Peter Navarro.

“Elon, when he is on his DOGE lane, is great. But we understand what’s going on here. We just have to understand. Elon sells cars,” Navarro said. He added: “He’s simply protecting his own interest as any business person would do.”

Trump indicated he disagreed with Musk, saying Sunday of the European Union, “They want to talk, but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.”

Lawrence Summers, an economist who was treasury secretary under Democratic President Bill Clinton, said Trump and his economic team are sending contradictory messages if they say they are interested in reviving manufacturing while still being open to negotiating with trade partners.

If other countries eliminate their tariffs, and the U.S, does, too, he said, “it’s just making a deal, then we don’t raise any revenue nor do we get any businesses to relocate to the United States. If it’s a permanent revenue source and trying to get businesses to relocate to the United States, then we’re going to have these tariffs permanently. So the president can’t have it both ways.”

Bessent was on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Hassett and Summers appeared on ABC’s “This Week,” Lutnick and Barrasso were on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and Navarro was interviewed on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

___

Gomez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writer Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.

Using strong-arm tactics in a bid to block the measure, Johnson tried an extraordinary use of the speaker’s power to prevent the House from even considering a measure backed by half its members. But nine Republicans refused to go along, instead dealing him a public rebuke that left him without a strategy for moving ahead.

After the vote, Johnson abruptly canceled votes for the rest of the week, sending members home and leaving legislative business unsettled. Under House rules, Republican leaders are required to bring the proxy voting resolution to a vote within two legislative days. But they appeared to be refusing to do anything else until the holdouts in their party cave, which they have shown no sign of doing. As Republicans left Washington for the week having passed no bills, it was not clear how or when the issue would be resolved.

The showdown on the House floor was a capstone of a long-running fight over the rights of new parents in Congress.

It began over a year ago, when Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., began agitating for a change to House rules that would allow new mothers to designate a colleague to vote by proxy on their behalf for up to six weeks after giving birth. Luna landed on the idea after her own child was born.

There is no maternity or paternity leave for lawmakers, who can take time away from office without sacrificing their pay but cannot vote if they are not physically in the Capitol. Proponents of the change have called it a common-sense fix to modernize Congress, where more women and more younger members serve now than did 200 years ago.

Democrats, including Reps. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado, who gave birth this year to her second child, and Sara Jacobs of California, joined Luna’s effort, expanding the resolution to include new fathers and up to 12 weeks of proxy voting during a parental leave.

Johnson has adamantly opposed the group at every turn, arguing that proxy voting is unacceptable and unconstitutional, even though the Supreme Court refused to take up a Republican-led lawsuit challenging pandemic-era proxy voting rules in the House.

On Tuesday, he used an unprecedented parliamentary maneuver to close off the only path that members of the House have for steering around their leaders and forcing a vote on a measure that has majority support.

But that measure failed on the floor by a 222-206 vote, keeping alive the proxy voting proposal. Eight Republicans joined Luna and all Democrats in voting no.

Johnson and his allies have argued that any accommodation that allows members to vote without being at the Capitol, no matter how narrow, creates a slippery slope for more, and that it harms member collegiality.

“I do believe it’s an existential issue for this body,” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the Rules Committee, said Tuesday. “Congress is defined as the ‘act of coming together and meeting.’”

Later on the floor, Foxx asserted flatly: “Put simply, members of Congress need to show up for work.”

When Johnson refused to bring the bill to the floor, Luna and her cohorts used a tool called the discharge petition — a demand signed by 218 members of the House, the majority of the body — to force consideration of the measure.

But on Tuesday morning, Republicans on the Rules Committee, often referred to as the “speaker’s committee” because the speaker uses it to maintain control of the floor, engineered a tricky behind-the-scenes maneuver to kill the effort.

They approved a measure that would block the proxy voting bill or any legislation on a similar topic from reaching the floor during the remainder of the Congress, effectively nullifying the discharge petition and closing off any chance for its supporters to secure a vote on the matter for the next two years.

GOP lawmakers inserted it into an unrelated resolution to allow for a vote on the SAVE Act, legislation requiring people to prove their citizenship when they register to vote, in a bid to pressure Republicans to support it. That is the measure that failed Tuesday on the floor.

Democrats implored Republicans to consider the proxy voting change, which they argued was vital to allowing all lawmakers to do their jobs.

“It is unfathomable that in 2025 we have not modernized Congress to address these very unique challenges that members face — these life events, where our voices should still be heard, our constituents should still be represented,” Pettersen said on the House floor, holding her 9-week-old son, Sam, who gurgled in her arms.

She denounced Johnson’s maneuver, saying: “It is anti-woman. It is anti-family.”

They also called the move an unprecedented attempt to shut down a crucial mechanism in the House for ensuring that measures that have majority support are voted upon.

“Republicans love to talk about family values, but when given the chance to actually support families, they turn their backs,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass. “If you want to protect your rights as members of Congress, you should vote no here.”

In trying to block the measure, Johnson took a gamble, risking public humiliation in a bid to thwart a resolution that had support from members of both parties.

Johnson even leaned on President Donald Trump to help him, people familiar with the conversations said, hoping the president could urge Luna, a stalwart Trump supporter, to stand down. The pressure campaign, however, appeared to have only strengthened Luna’s resolve.

On Monday, Luna resigned from the House Freedom Caucus, citing its members’ unwillingness to back her in what she called a “modest, family-centered proposal.”

After the vote Tuesday, she told reporters the proposal would improve the House and the country.

“We had a good majority of Republicans as well that agreed this needs to change and it’s part of a healthy republic,” she said. She added that it was a big day for the institution “and allowing new parents to have a voice in Washington.”

Johnson’s view is in line with the longtime Republican position on proxy voting.

Republicans savaged Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for breaking with centuries of history and House rules by instituting proxy voting during the coronavirus pandemic. When he was minority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., filed an unsuccessful lawsuit arguing that allowing a member of Congress to deputize a colleague to cast a vote on their behalf when they were not present was unconstitutional.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump said Sunday that “I’m not joking” about trying to serve a third term, the clearest indication he is considering ways to breach a constitutional barrier against continuing to lead the country after his second term ends at the beginning of 2029.

“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC News from Mar-a-Lago, his private club.

He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington that “I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged.” Trump lost that election to Democrat Joe Biden.

Still, Trump added: “I don’t want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, we’ve got a long time to go.”

The 22nd Amendment, added to the Constitution in 1951 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times in a row, says “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Any attempt to remain in office would be legally suspect and it is unclear how seriously Trump might pursue the idea. The comments nonetheless were an extraordinary reflection of the desire to maintain power by a president who had violated democratic traditions four years ago when he tried to overturn the election he lost to Biden.

“This is yet another escalation in his clear effort to take over the government and dismantle our democracy,” said a statement from Rep. Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat who served as lead counsel for Trump’s first impeachment. “If Congressional Republicans believe in the Constitution, they will go on the record opposing Trump’s ambitions for a third term.”

Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist who runs the right-wing “War Room” podcast, called for the president to run again during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month.

“We want Trump in ’28,” he said.

Kayla Thompson, a 30-year-old former paralegal in Wisconsin, said she would “absolutely” like Trump to serve another term.

“America needs him. America is headed in the right direction and, if he doesn’t do it, we’re probably headed backwards,” said Thompson, who was attending a campaign event Sunday with Elon Musk in Green Bay for a state Supreme Court race.

Jeremy Paul, a constitutional law professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, said “there are no credible legal arguments for him to run for a third term.”

NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump if one potential avenue to a third term was having Vice President JD Vance run for the top job and “then pass the baton to you.”

“Well, that’s one,” Trump responded. “But there are others too. There are others.”

“Can you tell me another?” Welker asked.

“No,” Trump replied.

Vance’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

Derek Muller, a professor of election law at Notre Dame, noted that the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804, says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”

Muller said that indicates that if Trump is not eligible to run for president again because of the 22nd Amendment, he is not eligible to run for vice president, either.

“I don’t think there’s any ‘one weird trick’ to getting around presidential term limits,” Muller said.

In addition, pursuing a third term would require extraordinary acquiescence by federal and state officials, not to mention the courts and voters themselves.

He suggested that Trump is talking about a third term for political reasons to “show as much strength as possible.”

“A lame-duck president like Donald Trump has every incentive in the world to make it seem like he’s not a lame duck,” he said.

Trump, who would be 82 at the end of his second term, was asked whether he would want to keep serving in “the toughest job in the country” at that point.

“Well, I like working,” the president said.

Trump suggested that Americans would go along with a third term because of his popularity. He falsely claimed to have “the highest poll numbers of any Republican for the last 100 years.”

Gallup data shows President George W. Bush reaching a 90% approval rating after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. His father, President George H.W. Bush, hit 89% following the Gulf War in 1991.

Trump has maxed out at 47% in Gallup data during his second term, despite claiming to be “in the high 70s in many polls, in the real polls.”

Trump has mused before about serving longer than two terms before, generally with jokes to friendly audiences.

“Am I allowed to run again?” he said during a House Republican retreat in January.

Representatives for the congressional leadership — House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York — did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the AP.

___

Associated Press writers Tom Beaumont in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The executive order directed at one of the country’s most prestigious law firms followed a well-worn playbook as President Donald Trump roared down the road to retribution.

Reaching beyond government, Trump has set out to impose his will across a broad swath of American life, from individuals who have drawn his ire to institutions known for their own flexes of power and intimidation.

Which is how the Paul Weiss, a storied New York law firm that since its 1875 birth has advanced the cause of civil rights, shepherded the legal affairs of corporate power brokers and grown into a multi-billion-dollar multinational enterprise, came to learn it was in trouble. The reason: One of its former attorneys had investigated Trump as a Manhattan prosecutor.

Trump ordered that federal security clearances of the firm’s attorneys be reviewed for suspension, federal contracts terminated and employee access to federal buildings restricted. Yet the decree was soon averted in the most Trumpian of ways: with a deal.

After a White House meeting with the firm’s chairman yielded a series of commitments, including $40 million worth of legal work to support administration causes, the executive order was rescinded, but not without a backlash from a legal community that saw the resolution as a capitulation.

The episode showed not only Trump’s use of the power of the presidency to police dissent and punish adversaries but also his success in extracting concessions from law firms, academia, Silicon Valley and corporate boardrooms. These targets were suddenly made to fear for their futures in the face of a retribution campaign that has been a defining feature of his first two months in office.

Just one day after Paul Weiss’ deal, Columbia University disclosed policy changes under the threat of losing billions of dollars in federal money. A week later, the venerable law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom cut a deal of its own before it could be hit by an executive order. Before that, ABC News and Meta reached multi-million-dollar settlements to resolve lawsuits from Trump.

“The more of them that cave, the more extortion that that invites,” said Ty Cobb, a White House lawyer in Trump’s first term who has since become a sharp critic. “You’ll see other universities and other law firms and other enemies of Trump assaulted and attacked into submission because of that.”

Some within the conservative legal community, by contrast, say the Republican president is acting within his right.

“It’s the president’s prerogative to instruct the executive branch to do business with companies, law firms or contractors that he deems trustworthy — and the converse is true too,” said Jay Town, a U.S. attorney from Alabama during Trump’s first term. “The president, as the commander in chief, can determine who gets a clearance and who doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.”

Some targets have not given in, with two law firms since the Paul Weiss deal suing to block executive orders. Yet no matter their response, the sanctioned firms have in most instances run afoul of the White House by virtue of association with prosecutors who previously investigated Trump.

If the negotiations have been surprising, consider that Trump telegraphed his approach during the campaign. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he told supporters in March 2023.

Less clear was: Retribution for what exactly? Against whom? By what means?

The answers would come soon enough.

One firm called Trump threat ‘an existential crisis’

Fresh off surviving four federal and state indictments that threatened to sink his political career, and investigations that shadowed his first term in office, Trump came straight for the prosecutors who investigated him and the elite firms he saw as sheltering them.

His Justice Department moved almost immediately to fire the members of special counsel Jack Smith’s team and some prosecutors who handled cases arising from the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

The White House followed up with an executive order that stripped security clearances from the lawyers at the law firm of Covington & Burling who have provided legal representation for Smith amid the threat of government investigations. Covington has said it looks forward to “defending Mr. Smith’s interests.”

A subsequent order punished Perkins Coie for its representation of then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign and its part in funding opposition research on Trump that took the form of a dossier containing unsubstantiated allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia.

Its business hanging in the balance, Perkins Coie hired Williams & Connolly, a Washington firm with an aggressive litigation style, to challenge the order. A federal judge said the administration’s action sent “chills down my spine” and blocked portions of it from taking effect. That decision could have been a meaningful precedent for other beleaguered firms.

Except that’s not what happened next.

The chairman of Paul Weiss said it, too, was initially prepared to sue over a March 14 order that targeted the firm in part because a former partner, Mark Pomerantz, had several years earlier overseen an investigation into Trump’s finances on behalf of the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

But the firm also came to believe that even a courtroom victory would not erase the perception among clients that it was “persona non grata” with the administration, its chairman, Brad Karp, later told colleagues in an email obtained by The Associated Press.

The order, Karp said, presented an “existential crisis” for a firm that has counted among its powerhouse representations the NFL and ExxonMobil. Some of its clients signaled they might abandon ship. The hoped-for support from fellow firms never materialized and some even sought to exploit Paul Weiss’ woes, Karp said.

“It was very likely that our firm would not be able to survive a protracted dispute with the Administration,” he wrote.

When the opportunity came for a White House meeting and the chance to cut a deal, he took it, pledging pro bono legal services for causes such as the fight against antisemitism as well as representation without regard to clients’ political affiliation. In so doing, he wrote, “we have quickly solved a seemingly intractable problem and removed a cloud of uncertainty that was hanging over our law firm.”

The outcry was swift. Lawyers outside the firm ridiculed it. More than 140 Paul Weiss alumni signed a letter assailing the capitulation.

“Instead of a ringing defense of the values of democracy, we witnessed a craven surrender to, and thus complicity in, what is perhaps the gravest threat to the independence of the legal profession since at least the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy,” the letter said.

Within days, two other firms, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, were confronted with executive orders over their affiliation with prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s special counsel team that investigated Trump during his first term. Both sued Friday. WilmerHale, where Mueller is a retired partner, said the order was an “unprecedented assault” on the legal system. After hearing arguments, judges blocked enforcement of key portions of both orders.

Yet that very day, the White House trumpeted a fresh deal with Skadden Arps in which the firm agreed to provide $100 million of pro bono legal services and to disavow the use of diversity, employment and inclusion considerations in its hiring practices.

Trump has expressed satisfaction with his pressure campaign, issuing a directive to sanction lawyers who are seen as bringing “frivolous” litigation against the government. Universities, he marveled, are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’”

As for law firms, he said, “They’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign?’ Nobody can believe it.’”

One Ivy League university also acceded to Trump’s demands

Uptown from Paul Weiss’s Midtown Manhattan home base, another elite New York institution was facing its own crucible.

Trump had taken office against the backdrop of disruptive protests at Columbia University tied to Israel’s war with Hamas. The turmoil prompted the resignation of its president and made the Ivy League school a target of critics who said an overly permissive campus environment had let antisemitic rhetoric flourish.

The Trump administration this month arrested a prominent Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident in his university-owned apartment building and opened an investigation into whether Columbia hid students sought by the U.S. over their involvement in the demonstrations.

In a separate action, the administration pulled $400 million from Columbia, canceling grants and contracts because of what the government said was the school’s failure to stamp out antisemitism and demanding a series of changes as a condition for restoring the money or for even considering doing so.

Two weeks later, the then-interim university president, Katrina Armstrong, announced that she would implement nearly all of the changes sought by the White House. Columbia would bar students from protesting in academic buildings, she said, adopt a new definition of antisemitism and put its Middle East studies department under new supervision.

The university’s March 21 rollout of reforms did not challenge the Trump administration’s coercive tactics, but nodded to what it said were “legitimate concerns” raised about antisemitism. U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said the university was “on the right track” but has not yet indicated whether funding might be restored.

The Columbia resolution was condemned by some faculty members and free speech advocates.

“Columbia’s capitulation endangers academic freedom and campus expression nationwide,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement at the time.

Armstrong on Friday night announced her exit from the position and her return to her post atop the school’s medical center.

Columbia is not Trump’s sole target in academia. Also this month, the administration suspended about $175 million in federal funding for the University of Pennsylvania over a transgender swimmer who last competed for the school in 2022.

Media companies have also been a target

Trump had not even taken office on Jan. 20 when one legal fight that could have followed him into office abruptly faded.

In December, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll.

The following month, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, agreed to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump against the company after it suspended his accounts following the Jan. 6 riot.

The agreement followed a visit by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Trump’s private Florida club to try to mend fences. Such a trip may have seemed unlikely in Trump’s first term, or after the Capitol siege made him, briefly, a pariah within his own party. But it’s something other technology, business and government officials have done.

The administration, meanwhile, has taken action against news organizations whose coverage it disagrees with. The White House last month removed Associated Press reporters and photographers from the small group of journalists who follow the president in the pool and other events after the news agency declined to follow Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico; a suit by the AP is pending.

And the administration has sought to dismantle Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded international news service. On Friday, a federal judge halted plans to fire more than 1,200 journalists, engineers and other staff who were sidelined after Trump ordered a funding cut.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says Wednesday will be “Liberation Day” — a moment when he plans to roll out a set of tariffs that he promises will free the United States from foreign goods.

The details of Trump’s next round of import taxes are still sketchy. Most economic analyses say average U.S. families would have to absorb the cost of his tariffs in the form of higher prices and lower incomes. But an undeterred Trump is inviting CEOs to the White House to say they are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in new projects to avoid the import taxes.

It is also possible that the tariffs are short-lived if Trump feels he can cut a deal after imposing them.

“I’m certainly open to it, if we can do something,” Trump told reporters. “We’ll get something for it.”

At stake are family budgets, America’s prominence as the world’s leading financial power and the structure of the global economy.

Here’s what you should know about the impending trade penalties:

What exactly does Trump plan to do?

He wants to announce import taxes, including “reciprocal” tariffs that would match the rates charged by other countries and account for other subsidies. Trump has talked about taxing the European Union, South Korea, Brazil and India, among other countries.

As he announced 25% auto tariffs last week, he alleged that America has been ripped off because it imports more goods than it exports.

“This is the beginning of Liberation Day in America,” Trump said. “We’re going to charge countries for doing business in our country and taking our jobs, taking our wealth, taking a lot of things that they’ve been taking over the years. They’ve taken so much out of our country, friend and foe. And, frankly, friend has been oftentimes much worse than foe.”

In an interview Saturday with NBC News, Trump said it did not bother him if tariffs caused vehicle prices to rise because autos with more U.S. content could possibly be more competitively priced.

“I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars,” Trump said. “I couldn’t care less because if the prices on foreign cars go up, they’re going to buy American cars.”

Trump has also suggested that he will be flexible with his tariffs, saying he will treat other nations better than they treated the United States. But he still has plenty of other taxes coming on imports.

The Republican president plans to tax imported pharmaceutical drugs, copper and lumber. He has put forth a 25% tariff on any country that imports oil from Venezuela, even though the United States also does so. Imports from China are being charged an additional 20% tax because of its role in fentanyl production. Trump has imposed separate tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico for the stated reason of stopping drug smuggling and illegal immigration. Trump also expanded his 2018 steel and aluminum tariffs to 25% on all imports.

Some aides suggest the tariffs are tools for negotiation on trade and border security; others say the revenues will help reduce the federal budget deficit. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says they will force other nations to show Trump “respect.”

What could tariffs do to the US economy?

Nothing good, according to most economists. They say the tariffs would get passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for autos, groceries, housing and other goods. Corporate profits could be lower and growth more sluggish. Trump maintains that more companies would open factories to avoid the taxes, though that process could take three years or more.

Economist Art Laffer estimates the tariffs on autos, if fully implemented, could increase per vehicle costs by $4,711, though he said he views Trump as a smart and savvy negotiator. The investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates the economy will grow this quarter at an annual rate of just 0.6%, down from a rate of 2.4% at the end of last year.

Mayor Andrew Ginther of Columbus, Ohio, said on Friday that tariffs could increase the median cost of a home by $21,000, making affordability more of an obstacle because building materials would cost more.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro told “Fox News Sunday” that the auto tariffs would raise $100 billion annually and the other tariffs would bring in about $600 billion per year, or about $6 trillion over 10 years. As a share of the economy, that would be the largest tax increase since World War II, according to Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has suggested that tariffs would be a one-time price adjustment, rather than the start of an inflationary spiral. But Bessent’s conclusion rests on tariffs being brief or contained, rather than leading other countries to retaliate with their own tariffs or seeping into other sectors of the economy.

“There is a chance tariffs on goods begin to filter through to the pricing of services,” said Samuel Rines, a strategist at WisdomTree. “Auto parts get move expensive, then auto repair gets more expensive, then auto insurance feels the pressure. While goods are the focus, tariffs could have a longer-term effect on inflation.”

How are other nations thinking about the new tariffs?

Most foreign leaders see the tariffs as destructive for the global economy, even if they are prepared to impose their own countermeasures.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Trump’s tariff threats had ended the partnership between his country and the United States, even as the president on Friday talked about his phone call with Carney in relatively positive terms. Canada already has announced retaliatory tariffs.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the tariffs were “not coherent” and would mean “breaking value chains, creating inflation in the short term and destroying jobs. It’s not good for the American economy, nor for the European, Canadian or Mexican economies.” Yet Macron said his nation would defend itself with the goal of dismantling the tariffs.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has avoided the tit-for-tat responses on tariffs, but she sees it as critical to defend jobs in her country.

The Chinese government said Trump’s tariffs would harm the global trading system and would not fix the economic challenges identified by Trump.

“There are no winners in trade wars or tariff wars, and no country’s development and prosperity are achieved through imposing tariffs,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said.

How did Trump land on it being called

‘Liberation Day’?

Based off Trump’s public statements, April 2 is at least the third “liberation day” that he has identified.

At a rally last year in Nevada, he said the day of the presidential election, Nov. 5, would be “Liberation Day in America.” He later gave his inauguration the same label, declaring in his address: “For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025, is Liberation Day.”

His repeated designation of the term is a sign of just how much importance Trump places on tariffs, an obsession of his since the 1980s. Dozens of other countries recognize their own form of liberation days to recognize events such as overcoming Nazi Germany or the end of a previous political regime deemed oppressive.

Trump sees his tariffs as providing national redemption, but the slumping consumer confidence and stock market indicate that much of the public believes the U.S. economy will pay the price for his ambitions.

“I don’t see anything positive about Liberation Day,” said Phillip Braun, a finance professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It’s going to hurt the U.S. economy. Other countries are going to retaliate.”

President Donald Trump’s official portrait in the Colorado Capitol will be taken down Monday night after the president took to social media to complain about what he claimed was a “purposefully distorted” portrayal.

The General Assembly’s executive committee — composed of legislative leadership from both parties — signed a joint directive to legislative staff Monday afternoon to remove the portrait. The image will be removed after the Capitol closes Monday night, legislative staff said in an email.

The painting will then be stored “in a secure and appropriate location… until further notice,” according to the directive.

In a statement, House Democratic spokesman Jarrett Freedman said Republican leadership had asked that the portrait be removed.

“If the GOP wants to spend time and money on which portrait of Trump hangs in the Capitol,” he wrote, “then that’s up to them.”

Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen, a Republican, said that he requested for Trump’s portrait to be taken down and replaced by one “that depicts his contemporary likeness.”

The portrait, commissioned during Trump’s first term, was paid for with a Republican-led fundraising effort and approved by Colorado Republicans before it was put on display in 2019.

The portrayal sparked Trump’s ire Sunday night.

“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” Trump wrote in his post on Truth Social.

Former state Senate President Kevin Grantham, a Republican, raised nearly $11,000 in an online fundraiser for the portrait in the summer of 2018 after he learned no donations had been received to fund the painting more than a year into Trump’s first term.

“I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one,” Trump wrote Sunday night, asking that Gov. Jared Polis “take it down.”

The unveiling of the portrait on Aug. 1, 2019 — at an event hosted by the Colorado Senate Republicans and artist Sarah Boardman of Colorado Springs — was described as nonpartisan by organizers.

In an interview Monday, Grantham recalled the event as “nothing but smiles and applause and support for the artist and her work.” Trump’s sudden criticism “caught me a little off guard,” Grantham said.

Grantham said that if any living president has an issue with their portrait at the Capitol, “it would be silly to keep it up.” It’s meant to honor the office of the presidency and the individuals in that exclusive club — but also, it’s a simple respect for the person to take down an image they don’t like, he said.

He also defended Boardman as an accomplished artist whose works would stand the test of time and didn’t deserve some of the vitriol lobbed her way.

“Even if we don’t like the current occupant of the White House, or the previous one, or the previous 10, let’s show some consideration to them as a human being first and foremost,” Grantham said.

Grantham said he’d be “happy to assist” in whatever the next steps are to replace Trump’s portrait.

Shelby Wieman, the governor’s press secretary, said in a statement Monday that Polis was “surprised to learn the president of the United States is an aficionado of our Colorado State Capitol and its artwork.”

“We appreciate the president and everyone’s interest in our Capitol building and are always looking for any opportunity to improve our visitor experience,” Wieman said.

Trump’s social media post complained about Boardman, who also painted former President Barack Obama’s portrait in the Capitol’s Gallery of Presidents.

“The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst,” Trump wrote. “She must have lost her talent as she got older.”

Boardman previously told The Denver Post it was important to her that both Trump and Obama looked apolitical in their portraits because the gallery is meant to tell the story of the U.S. and not one specific president.

The other 43 presidential portraits in the Colorado gallery were painted by Lawrence Williams. He died before he could continue the collection with Obama’s portrait.

In 2018, after Colorado Citizens for Culture’s initial effort had failed to raise any money for a Trump portrait, an aide to then-House Speaker Crisanta Duran, a Democrat, helped a liberal political group sneak a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin into the Capitol, where it was displayed on an easel beneath the spot reserved for Trump.

Grantham launched his own fundraising campaign days later.

Trump’s Sunday night comments prompted a steady stream of visitors to pose for photos with the painting before the announcement that it would be taken down.

Aaron Howe, visiting from Wyoming on Monday, stood in front of Trump’s portrait, looking down at photos of the president on his phone, then back up at the portrait.

“Honestly he looks a little chubby,” said Howe of the portrait, but “better than I could do.”

“I don’t know anything about the artist,” said Howe, who voted for Trump. “It could be taken one way or the other.”

Kaylee Williamson, an 18-year-old Trump supporter from Arkansas, got a photo with the portrait.

“I think it looks like him. I guess he’s smoother than all the other ones,” she said. “I think it’s fine.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Late in February, as the Trump administration ramped up its quest to transform the federal government, a psychiatrist who treats veterans was directed to her new workstation — and was incredulous.

She was required, under a new return-to-office policy, to conduct virtual psychotherapy with her patients from one of 13 cubicles in a large open office space, the kind of setup used for call centers. Other staff members might overhear the sessions, or appear on the patient’s screen as they passed on their way to the bathroom and break room.

The psychiatrist was stunned. Her patients had mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Treating them from her home office, it had taken many months to earn their trust. This new arrangement, she said, violated a core ethical tenet of mental health care: the guarantee of privacy.

When the doctor asked how she was expected to safeguard patient privacy, a supervisor suggested she purchase privacy screens and a white-noise machine.

“I’m ready to walk away if it comes to it,” she wrote to her manager in a text message shared with The New York Times.

“I get it,” the manager replied. “Many of us are ready to walk away.”

Scenes like this have been unfolding in Department of Veterans Affairs facilities across the country in recent weeks, as therapy and other mental health services have been thrown into turmoil amid the dramatic changes ordered by President Donald Trump and pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Among the most consequential orders is the requirement that thousands of mental health providers, including many who were hired for fully remote positions, now work full time from federal office space. This is a jarring policy reversal for the VA, which pioneered the practice of virtual health care two decades ago as a way to reach isolated veterans, long before the pandemic made telehealth the preferred mode of treatment for many Americans.

As the first wave of providers reports to offices where there is simply not enough room to accommodate them, many found no way to ensure patient privacy, health workers said. Some have filed complaints, warning that the arrangement violates ethics regulations and medical privacy laws. At the same time, layoffs of at least 1,900 probationary employees are thinning out already stressed services that assist veterans who are homeless or suicidal.

In more than three dozen interviews, current and recently terminated mental health workers at the VA described a period of rapid, chaotic behind-the-scenes change. Many agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because they want to continue to serve veterans, and fear retribution from the Trump administration.

Clinicians warn that the changes will degrade mental health treatment at the VA, which already has severe staffing shortages. Some expect to see a mass exodus of sought-after specialists, like psychiatrists and psychologists. They expect wait times to increase and veterans to eventually seek treatment outside the agency.

“Psychotherapy is a very private endeavor,” said Ira Kedson, a psychologist at the Coatesville VA Medical Center in Pennsylvania and president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 310. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, where people can talk about their deepest, darkest fears and issues.” Veterans, he said, trust that what they tell therapists is confidential.

“If they can’t trust us to do that, I think that a sizable number of them will withdraw from treatment,” he said.

A VA spokesperson, Peter Kasperowicz, dismissed the contention that a crowded working environment would compromise patient privacy as “nonsensical,” saying the VA “will make accommodations as needed so employees have enough space to work and comply with industry standards for privacy.”

“Veterans are now at the center of everything VA does,” Kasperowicz added. “Under President Trump, VA is no longer a place where the status quo for employees is to simply phone it in from home.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said the president’s return-to-office order was “ensuring that all Americans benefit from more efficient services, especially our veterans.”

The DOGE cuts have already sparked chaos and confusion within the agency, which provides care to more than 9 million veterans. The Trump administration has said it plans to eliminate 80,000 VA jobs, and a first round of terminations has halted some research studies and slashed the support staff.

The cuts drive at a sensitive constituency for Trump, who has campaigned on improving services at the VA. In Trump’s first term, the agency expanded remote work to reach veterans who are socially isolated and living in rural areas, and who are at an elevated risk for suicide. Now those services are likely to be sharply reduced.

“The end of remote work is essentially the same as cutting mental health services,” said a clinician at a mental health center hub in Kansas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “These remote docs aren’t moving, and they have other options if they are forced to drive to some office however many miles away every day to see their patient virtually from there.”

Veterans, too, are expressing anxiety. Sandra Fenelon, 33, said she had a rocky transition back to civilian life after leaving the Navy in 2022. “I just constantly felt like I am at war,” said Fenelon, who lives in New York and is training to become a pharmacist.

It took a year working with a VA psychologist until she felt safe enough to begin sharing the troubling things she had seen on deployment, things that, she said, “people on the outside would never understand.”

Now Fenelon is worried that the tumult at the VA will prompt her therapist to leave before she is better. In her session this past week, she burst into tears.

“I feel like I’m now forced to be put in a position where I have to start over with someone else,” she said in an interview. “How can I relate to a therapist who never worked with veterans?”

“You Deserve Better”

For a suicide prevention coordinator in California, mornings start with referrals from a crisis hotline. On a typical day, she said, she is given a list of 10 callers, but sometimes as many as 20 or 30. The work is so intense that most days there is no time for a lunch break or bathroom breaks.

“My job is to build rapport, to figure out what I need to do to keep them alive. I let them know: ‘I’m worried about you. I’m going to send someone out to check on you,’” the coordinator said. “I tell them, ‘You served this country. You deserve better.’”

The team, which is responsible for covering some 800,000 veterans, was supposed to get three more social workers, but the new positions were canceled as a result of the administration’s hiring freeze, the coordinator said.

She said the stress around the staff reductions is intense, and she fears that it will cause her to miss something critical. “I’m so scared I’ll make a mistake,” she said. “I’m not sleeping well, and it’s hard to stay focused.”

Veterans are at sharply higher risk for suicide than the general population; in 2022, the suicide rate was 34.7 per 100,000, compared with 14.2 per 100,000 for the general population. A major factor in this is the availability of firearms, which were used in 73.5% of suicides, according to the VA.

In Denver, Bilal Torrens was just finishing a shift when he was notified by email that he was being terminated.

His job was helping homeless veterans settle into life indoors after years of living on the street. During those early months, Torrens said, the men are often overwhelmed by the task of collecting benefits, managing medications, even shopping for groceries; he would sit with his clients while they filled out forms and paid bills.

The layoffs reduced the support staff at the homeless service center by a third. The burden will now shift to social workers, who are already struggling under caseloads of dozens of veterans, he said.

“They’re not going to have enough time to serve any of the veterans properly, the way that they should be served and cared for,” Torrens said.

Fears About Privacy and Jobs

In Coatesville, Pennsylvania, mental health providers have been told they will conduct therapy with veterans from several large office spaces, sitting with their laptops at tables, Kedson said, speaking in his capacity as union president. The spaces are familiar, he said, but they have never been used for patient care.

“That would sound like you’re seeing them from a call center, because you’d be in a room with a bunch of people who are all talking at the same time,” Kedson said. “The veterans who are going to be in that position, I suspect they will feel very much like their privacy is being violated.”

So far, only supervisory clinicians have been affected by the return-to-office policy; unionized workers will be expected to report to the office in the coming weeks.

Kedson said clinicians have warned that the orders compromise patient privacy, but he has seen little response from the agency’s leadership.

“They’re doing it because these are the marching orders coming out of the current administration,” he said. “People are trying to make something that is really untenable work.”

Lynn Bufka, head of practice at the American Psychological Association, said the “long-standing presumed practice for the delivery of psychotherapy” requires a private location, like a room with a door and soundproofing outside the room.

She said HIPAA, the health privacy law, allows for “incidental disclosures” of patient information if they cannot be reasonably prevented — a threshold that she said the VA risks not meeting. In this case, she said, the privacy risk could be prevented “by simply not requiring psychologists to return to the office until private spaces are available.”

Several VA mental health clinicians told the Times that they were interviewing for new jobs or had submitted their resignations. Their departures risk exacerbating already severe staffing shortages at the VA, outlined in a report last year from its inspector general’s office.

“Everybody is afraid, from the top down,” said Matthew Hunnicutt, 62, a social worker who retired in late February after nearly 15 years, much of it in supervisory positions, at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago.

When staff members were ordered to shut down diversity initiatives, Hunnicutt decided to speed up his retirement, feeling that “everything I had done was just wiped away.”

He said care at the VA had improved during his time there, with better community outreach, shorter wait times and same-day mental health appointments.

“Just to have it be destroyed like this is extreme,” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday temporarily blocking the deportations, but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in a statement Sunday, responded to speculation about whether the administration was flouting court orders: “The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.”

The acronym refers to the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump targeted in his unusual proclamation that was released Saturday

In a court filing Sunday, the Department of Justice, which has appealed Boasberg’s decision, said it would not use the Trump proclamation he blocked for further deportations if his decision is not overturned.

Trump sidestepped a question over whether his administration violated a court order while speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday evening.

“I don’t know. You have to speak to the lawyers about that,” he said, although he defended the deportations. “I can tell you this. These were bad people.”

Asked about invoking presidential powers used in times of war, Trump said, “This is a time of war,” describing the influx of criminal migrants as “an invasion.”

Trump’s allies were gleeful over the results.

“Oopsie…Too late,” Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who agreed to house about 300 immigrants for a year at a cost of $6 million in his country’s prisons, wrote on the social media site X above an article about Boasberg’s ruling. That post was recirculated by White House communications director Steven Cheung.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who negotiated an earlier deal with Bukele to house immigrants, posted on the site: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”

Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.

“This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.

The immigrants were deported after Trump’s declaration of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has been used only three times in U.S. history.

The law, invoked during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II, requires a president to declare the United States is at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners who otherwise would have protections under immigration or criminal laws. It was last used to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.

Venezuela’s government in a statement Sunday rejected the use of Trump’s declaration of the law, characterizing it as evocative of “the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”

Tren de Aragua originated in an infamously lawless prison in the central state of Aragua and accompanied an exodus of millions of Venezuelans, the overwhelming majority of whom were seeking better living conditions after their nation’s economy came undone during the past decade. Trump seized on the gang during his campaign to paint misleading pictures of communities that he contended were “taken over” by what were actually a handful of lawbreakers.

The Trump administration has not identified the immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States. It also sent two top members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang to El Salvador who had been arrested in the United States.

Video released by El Salvador’s government Sunday showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down to have them bend down at the waist.

The video also showed the men being transported to prison in a large convoy of buses guarded by police and military vehicles and at least one helicopter. The men were shown kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.

The immigrants were taken to the notorious CECOT facility, the centerpiece of Bukele’s push to pacify his once violence-wracked country through tough police measures and limits on basic rights

The Trump administration said the president actually signed the proclamation contending Tren de Aragua was invading the United States on Friday night but didn’t announce it until Saturday afternoon. Immigration lawyers said that, late Friday, they noticed Venezuelans who otherwise couldn’t be deported under immigration law being moved to Texas for deportation flights. They began to file lawsuits to halt the transfers.

“Basically any Venezuelan citizen in the US may be removed on pretext of belonging to Tren de Aragua, with no chance at defense,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office for Latin America, a human rights group, warned on X.

The litigation that led to the hold on deportations was filed on behalf of five Venezuelans held in Texas who lawyers said were concerned they’d be falsely accused of being members of the gang. Once the act is invoked, they warned, Trump could simply declare anyone a Tren de Aragua member and remove them from the country.

Boasberg barred those Venezuelans’ deportations Saturday morning when the suit was filed, but only broadened it to all people in federal custody who could be targeted by the act after his afternoon hearing. He noted that the law has never before been used outside of a congressionally declared war and that plaintiffs may successfully argue Trump exceeded his legal authority in invoking it.

The bar on deportations stands for up to 14 days and the immigrants will remain in federal custody during that time. Boasberg has scheduled a hearing Friday to hear additional arguments in the case.

He said he had to act because the immigrants whose deportations may actually violate the U.S. Constitution deserved a chance to have their pleas heard in court.

“Once they’re out of the country,” Boasberg said, “there’s little I could do.”

_____

Cano reported from Caracas, Venezuela.