Here’s what happened under President Donald Trump this week.
Trump is the first president in nearly a century to use tariffs as a major economic tool. He’s spent much of his second term putting tariffs on nearly every country that trades with the United States, in an aim to protect U.S. jobs and products.
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The Supreme Court knocked his most sweeping ones down this year. But on Friday, the Trump administration put a 10 percent tariff on goods from 60 economies, including the European Union. Trump is using a new legal rationale: Rather than say it’s a national emergency, he’s citing a 1970s law that says tariffs can be placed on countries with unreasonable trade practices such as forced labor.
But experts say that might not past muster, given that one of the countries subject to the new tariffs is Canada, which for decades has been one of the United States’ closest trading partners (and also bans forced labor).
The Trump administration is also reaching for a never-before-used provision of a 1930 trade law to threaten up to 50 percent tariffs on Canadian products in the next month — an extraordinarily high amount. That came days after Trump brought up the possibility of making Canada pay for wildfire smoke that polluted the air in much of the United States.
Even more tariffs could come soon, reports The Washington Post’s David Lynch. As we saw with the last legal wrangling on this issue, the court battle could last a year or more.
The conflict in Iran is widening in the Middle East, and oil prices are again spiking. The American public’s unease with the war is increasingly being reflected in Congress, which has technically never approved it despite the Constitution saying only Congress can declare war.
The military is asking Congress for tens of billions more to keep fighting, but that funding is uncertain. This week, the Republican-controlled House voted to limit Trump’s operations in Iran. That vote was led by Democrats and a handful of Republicans, some of whom are vulnerable in November’s midterm elections. The Republican-controlled Senate blocked a similar measure Thursday, but last month the Senate voted for a war powers resolution seeking to rein in Trump’s authority.
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colorado) predicted that Republicans would hear from constituents angry about the war during the House’s August break. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll this month found that nearly 70 percent of respondents thought that the war was not “worth fighting.” Eighteen U.S. service members have died during the conflict, with nearly 430 injured.
“When we come back in September, I bet we have more people joining with us saying, ‘All right, let’s wrap this up,’” Crow told reporters.
As part of Trump’s continuing efforts to get Congress to pass voting restrictions, he’s seeking to fold in a popular, yet entirely unrelated, item into the Save America Act: a law banning transgender athletes from playing in girls and women’s sports.
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It’s a politically popular idea: A June poll released by Quinnipiac University found 7 in 10 voters agree with that stance. This week, the Trump administration elevated WNBA player Sophie Cunningham — mentioning her in White House briefings and memes sent out on Education Department social media — after she said that transgender athletes should not participate in women’s sports. The Supreme Court this year upheld state bans on transgender athletes playing in women’s sports, clearing the way for more bans, which had previously faced years of being held up in court.
Also this week, a prominent Democratic think tank released a paper recommending that Democratic candidates stand for trans rights while acknowledging that restrictions on transgender participation in sports “may be appropriate.”
Trans rights supporters argue the whole conversation is overblown and that transgender players are relatively rare and misunderstood.
“Exclusion is never the answer,” Minnesota Lynx Coach Cheryl Reeve said this week. “Separate isn’t equal, and trans lives matter.”
A decade ago, Joe Biden taped interviews with a writer who was helping him prepare his memoir. (Biden had yet to become president.) The Justice Department got hold of those tapes at the end of Biden’s first term as it investigated Biden’s handling of classified material. The lead investigator used those tapes, in part, to decline to bring charges, saying a jury would probably view Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” rather than someone who willfully kept classified material.
At the time, Biden was running for reelection. A conservative think tank tried to get those tapes and transcripts and fought Biden’s team in court for years. This week, a court agreed the Heritage Foundation could have them.
It comes years after Biden exited national politics, of course, but the debate about whether anyone hid his aging from the public is likely to be a topic in the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential primary.
The rest of the legal news this week wasn’t that good for Trump: The Justice Department backed off trying to subpoena New York Times reporters after a judge basically told it to, saying the aggressive legal move after the Times published a story Trump didn’t like had raised “profound First Amendment” issues. A judge in D.C. warned that Trump’s repairs to the Reflecting Pool could undermine a case against a former Olympian accused of damaging it. And Trump is struggling to prosecute noncitizens for voting, with very few cases holding up in court over the allegation there was bad intent.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
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