Donald Trump on if he was aware of Elon Musk using drugs during the 2024 campaign: I am ...
US President Donald Trump has confirmed that he was not aware of Tesla CEO Elon Musk regularly using drugs during the
2024 presidential campaign
. Trump's comments came in response to a recent New York Times report that cited unnamed sources to allege that the tech billionaire frequently used drugs such as ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms while being involved in presidential campaigning efforts with Trump last year. The NYT report also noted that it was unclear whether Musk used drugs while potentially working for Trump in a proposed
Department of Government Efficiency
(DOGE). Speaking to reporters after returning from a rally in Pennsylvania (as noted by USA Today), Trump denied having any knowledge of Musk's drug usage during the campaign ahead of the 2024 US elections.
When asked if the report bothered him, Trump replied,
'I'm not troubled by anything with Elon.'
Moreover, he described the ex-DOGE leader as
"fantastic.'
What we know about Elon Musk's history of using drugs
During a recent Oval Office event, a reporter also attempted to question Musk about alleged drug use during the 2024 campaign, USA Today reported. However, the billionaire sidestepped the inquiry and instead criticised The New York Times' coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
'Let's move on,'
he said, standing behind President Trump at the Resolute Desk.
In March 2024, he admitted to using prescribed ketamine to treat periods of depression and concerned corporate leaders by smoking marijuana on a 2018 podcast.
The NYT report claimed that Musk carries a daily pillbox with about 20 medications, including Adderall, stimulants, and psychedelics. The report's sources alleged that he used ketamine often, sometimes daily, and combined it with other drugs.
He has also reportedly partaken in Ecstasy and magic mushrooms at private events, reflecting a broader history of recreational drug use.
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Mint
30 minutes ago
- Mint
An astonishing raid deep inside Russia rewrites the rules of war
SHORTLY AFTER noon on June 1st, Russian social media began flashing, alerting the world to Ukraine's most audacious operation on Russian territory to date. In Irkutsk province in eastern Siberia, some 4,000km from Ukraine, locals posted footage of small quadcopter drones emerging from lorries and flying toward a nearby airfield, home to some of Russia's most important strategic bombers. 'I work at a tire shop," one wrote. 'A truck pulled in, and drones flew out of it." From an airbase near Murmansk, in Russia's far north, came similar stories: 'The driver's running are flying from his truck toward the base." Other alarmed posts soon followed from airbases in Ryazan and Ivanovo provinces, deep in central Russia. Ukraine's main security agency, the SBU, has since claimed responsibility for the operation, which it has codenamed 'Spider Web". It said at least 41 Russian aircraft were destroyed or damaged across four airfields, including rare and extremely expensive A-50 early-warning planes (Russia's equivalent of the AWACS) and Tu-22M3 and Tu-95 strategic bombers. The agency also released footage in which its pugnacious chief, Vasily Maliuk, is heard commenting on the operation. 'Russian strategic bombers," he says in his recognisable growl, 'all burning delightfully." The strike is one of the heaviest blows that Ukraine has landed on Russia in a war now well into its fourth year. Russia has relatively small numbers of strategic bombers—probably fewer than 90 operational Tu-22, Tu-95 and newer Tu-160s in total. The planes can carry nuclear weapons, but have been used to fire conventional cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets, as recently as last week. That has made them high-priority targets for Ukrainian military planners. Many of the aircraft are old and no longer produced—the last Tu-22M3s and Tu-95s were made more than 30 years ago—and their replacements, the Tu-160, are being manufactured at a glacial pace. The fact that Ukraine was able to damage or destroy such a large number of Russia's most advanced aircraft deep inside the country reflects the development of its deep-strike programme, as well as the remarkable extent to which Ukraine's undercover operatives are now able to work inside Russia. Since the start of the Kremlin's all-out invasion, Ukraine's operations have expanded in range, ambition and sophistication. Western countries have provided some assistance to Ukraine's deep-strike programme—on May 28th Germany promised to finance Ukrainian long-range drones—but much of the technology and mission planning is indigenous. Today's operation is likely to be ranked among the most important raiding actions in modern warfare. According to sources, the mission was 18 months in the making. Russia had been expecting attacks by larger fixed-wing drones at night and closer to the border with Ukraine. The Ukrainians reversed all three variables, launching small drones during the day, and doing so far from the front lines. Ukraine had launched drones from within Russia previously; the difference was the scale and combined nature of the operations. Commentators close to the Ukrainian security services suggest that as many as 150 drones and 300 bombs had been smuggled into Russia for the operations. The quadcopters were apparently built into wooden cabins, loaded onto lorries and then released after the roofs of the cabins were remotely retracted. The drones used Russian mobile-telephone networks to relay their footage back to Ukraine, much of which was released by the gleeful Ukrainians. They also used elements of automated targeting, the accounts claim. A Ukrainian intelligence source said it was unlikely that the drivers of the trucks knew what they were carrying. He compared this aspect of the operation to the 2022 attack on Kerch bridge, where a bomb concealed in a lorry destroyed part of the bridge linking Crimea with the mainland. 'These kinds of operations are very complex, with key players necessarily kept in the dark," he said. The source described the operation as a multi-stage chess move, with the Russians first encouraged to move more of their planes to particular bases by Ukrainian strikes on other ones. Three days before the attack, dozens of planes had moved to the Olenya airfield in Murmansk province, according to reports published at the time. It was precisely here that the most damage was done. The operation casts a shadow over a new round of peace talks that is scheduled to start in Istanbul on June 2nd. Ukraine has been terrorised in recent months by Russia's own massive strikes, sometimes involving hundreds of drones: one that took place overnight beginning on May 31st apparently involved a record 472 drones, the Ukrainian authorities say. Kyiv had been looking for ways to demonstrate to Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, that there is a cost to continuing the war. But the question is whether this operation has moved the dial, or simply raised the stakes. Chatter on Russian patriotic social-media networks has called for a severe response, likening the moment to Pearl Harbour, Japan's attack on America's Pacific Fleet in 1941. A senior Ukrainian official acknowledged that the operation carried risks of turning Western partners away from Ukraine. 'The worry is that this is Sinop," he said, referring to Russia's strike on an Ottoman port in 1853 that ended up isolating the attacker on the world stage. Western armed forces are watching closely. For many years they have concentrated their own aircraft at an ever smaller number of air bases, to save money, and have failed to invest in hardened hangars or shelters that could protect against drones and missiles. America's own strategic bombers are visible in public satellite imagery, sitting in the open. 'Imagine, on game-day," writes Tom Shugart of CNAS, a think-tank in Washington, 'containers at railyards, on Chinese-owned container ships in port or offshore, on trucks parked at random properties…spewing forth thousands of drones that sally forth and at least mission-kill the crown jewels of the [US Air Force]." That, he warns, would be 'entirely feasible".
Mint
38 minutes ago
- Mint
Where the trade court's tariff decision went wrong
President Donald Trump announces tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2. During a national crisis, an advocate of tariffs testified before Congress that 'reciprocal trade agreements" push foreign nations to stop erecting 'excessive economic barriers to trade." Who said this? President Trump? Sen. Reed Smoot or Rep. Willis Hawley? It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull, explaining in 1940 how reciprocal tariffs could reverse unfair trade practices targeting the U.S. Mr. Trump's policy of using reciprocal tariffs to advance U.S. interests isn't a new or radical idea, and it's a necessary one. The U.S. Court of International Trade was wrong to rule on Wednesday that the administration had exceeded its authority in imposing these tariffs. The ruling overlooked history, statute, precedent and national interest. It was a misreading of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, and a misinterpretation of America's bipartisan tradition of using trade policy to defend national economic resilience. On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit stayed the trade court's ruling while it considers an appeal. In a separate case, a district judge in Washington issued an injunction against the tariffs, although he stayed his own order. The issue requires resolution only the Supreme Court can deliver. Americans should hope the justices side with Mr. Trump. In its May 28 decision, V.O.S. Selections v. U.S., the trade court held that IEEPA doesn't authorize the president to impose 'unbounded" tariffs. The opinion misses the mark on legal and historical fronts. It substitutes policy skepticism for statutory interpretation, undermining legitimate executive authority during declared national emergencies. The trade court's reading of IEEPA contradicts the statute's text and history. IEEPA's independent emergency authority allows the president to regulate, prevent or prohibit the importation of property in which foreign countries or nationals have an interest. The language mirrors that of the earlier Trading with the Enemy Act, which President Richard Nixon used to impose a universal 10% tariff in 1971. The courts upheld Nixon's use of that power in U.S. v. Yoshida International (1975), concluding that tariffs were a sensible approach to regulating imports during a declared emergency. Congress enacted IEEPA in 1977 with language directly drawn from the Trading with the Enemy Act. The trade court's description of the tariffs as 'unbounded" also contradicts Mr. Trump's painstakingly specific April 2 executive order, which imposes precise duties, product exemptions and country-specific rates. I should know: I helped coordinate their implementation. Further, the court errs in implicitly inviting itself to review the sufficiency of the president's emergency declaration. IEEPA requires only that the president declare a national emergency 'to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat" arising outside the U.S., which is exactly what the executive order does. Trade deficits can qualify as emergencies. In the Trade Act of 1974, Congress recognized that 'large and serious" balance-of-payments deficits could justify swift presidential action, including tariffs and quotas. This act's unique procedures didn't preclude similar IEEPA authorities addressing identical threats. Second-guessing presidential responses to emergencies defies precedent. In Dames & Moore v. Regan (1981), the Supreme Court acknowledged the validity of President Jimmy Carter's hostage crisis response, intact to this day, which froze Iranian property in the U.S. Courts have long held that the political branches—not judges—determine how to deal with foreign economic threats that rise to emergency levels. Further, in Field v. Clark (1892), the justices held that 'it is often desirable, if not essential . . . to invest the President with large discretion in matters arising out of the execution of statutes relating to trade and commerce with other nations." While IEEPA gives the president significant latitude, Congress can terminate a national emergency by joint resolution. That Congress hasn't thwarted Mr. Trump's tariffs counsels restraint in questioning his decision. The trade court evidently yearns to restore misguided economic orthodoxy. But frictionless global trade remains a mirage. Even John Maynard Keynes, hardly an economic nationalist, cautioned against the utopian allure of borderless commerce: 'Let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national." The pursuit of a perfectly undistorted global market ignores American history and legal tradition. Hull's reciprocal-tariff program of the 1930s—the foundation of U.S. multilateral trade—was premised on the imposition of duties on imports from countries that refused to lower theirs. Hull understood that economic resets require leverage. The test of judicial reasoning is whether it honors the text, structure and history of the law it interprets. The Court of International Trade fell short of that test. Mr. Bogden is a fellow at the Steamboat Institute and a former clerk for the U.S. Court of International Trade.
Hindustan Times
44 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Zelensky praises ‘brilliant' drone attack as Ukraine damages 40 Russian jets
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Sunday that the country's armed forces had conducted a "brilliant operation" in Russia aimed "exclusively at military targets" which destroyed over 40 aircraft in an operation named 'Spiderweb'. In a series of posts on X, Zelensky said, 'Just now, I received a report from Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Vasyl Maliuk - a brilliant operation was carried out. It took place on enemy territory and was aimed exclusively at military targets - specifically, the equipment used in strikes against Ukraine. Russia suffered truly significant losses - entirely justified and deserved.' Also Read: Drones hidden in trucks: How Ukraine carried out Operation Spider's Web in Russia The Ukrainian President thanked the country's Security Service and its chief, General Maliuk, as well as everyone who was involved in the operation. The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) conducted large-scale drone strikes against several air bases deep inside Russia, destroying over 40 combat planes as part of Operation Spiderweb, a day ahead of the peace talks scheduled to be held between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. Also Read: Watch | Moment when Ukrainian drones hit Russian military jets in massive attack He said, "What's most interesting - and this can now be stated publicly - is that the "office" of our operation on Russian territory was located directly next to FSB headquarters in one of their regions. In total, 117 drones were used in the operation - with a corresponding number of drone operators involved. 34 per cent of the strategic cruise missile carriers stationed at air bases were hit." Also Read: What are FPV drones Ukraine used to strike deep inside Russia under Operation Spider's Web? Zelensky added, 'Our personnel operated across multiple Russian regions - in three different time zones. And the people who assisted us were withdrawn from Russian territory before the operation, they are now safe. It is genuinely satisfying when something I authorized a year and six months ago comes to fruition and deprives Russians of over forty units of strategic aviation. We will continue this work." Zelensky stated that even before Operation Spiderweb was carried out in Russian territory, Ukraine had received intelligence that Russia was preparing another massive strike against them. He called on people not to ignore air raid alerts. "Last night, there were nearly 500 Russian attack drones. Each week, they have been increasing the number of units used per strike. Now, they have also prepared Kalibr missiles launched from naval carriers. We know exactly who we are dealing with. And we will defend ourselves by all means available to us, to Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Not for a single second did we want this war," he said, in a post on X. The President reiterated that Ukraine had offered a ceasefire to Russia, and the US proposal for the same had been on the table since March 11, and yet, Putin had chosen to continue the war. "It was the Russians who chose to continue the war, even under conditions where the entire world is calling for an end to the killing. And pressure is truly needed - pressure on Russia that should bring it back to reality. Pressure through sanctions. Pressure from our forces. Pressure through diplomacy. All of it must work together," Zelensky said.
